


(and perhaps it was) inevitable

by qqueenofhades



Category: Timeless (TV 2016)
Genre: F/M, Garcia Flynn Human Disaster, fuck me and also them, it's a fic now, the trash saga of flynn and lucy, yes so
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-02-16
Updated: 2018-02-16
Packaged: 2018-09-25 00:52:30
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 12
Words: 84,223
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9795032
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/qqueenofhades/pseuds/qqueenofhades
Summary: They're getting tired of pretending they aren't following each other through history for more than one reason. (Started out with less plot. Got more plot. Is now an actual fic. I regret my life choices.)





	1. Chapter 1

**I.**

Lucy’s fingers claw in his hair, pulling him sharply against her, as Flynn lifts her and shoves her back against the wall, hand sliding up her thigh to the buttons of her stocking garter, the dim dancehall music thudding from the front of the club, in a distorted, echoing way as if from underwater. Neither of them seem willing to stop kissing – or rather, practically biting each other’s mouths off, a silent and furious struggle for power, for accepting the inevitable – long enough to do this in any kind of proper fashion. It’s 1929 New Orleans, the height of Prohibition and two days before Black Tuesday, and she’s tracked him down to this illicit speakeasy, dark hole-in-the-wall, as Wyatt and Rufus are out looking for the target they think he’s here to take down, something to do with him wanting to make the Depression even worse than it was, so even FDR can’t New Deal them out of it in another few years. Lucy’s job was to keep Flynn himself distracted. Easy enough.

(She reckons, rather, that he’s distracted. So, for that matter, is she.)

(He saw that look in her eye when she had to admit that Lindbergh hadn’t changed, that she had tried, that she had failed, and _God,_ she’s angry.)

Flynn gets his hand the rest of the way up her leg, pushing aside the sequins of her dress and curling around her stocking, undoing the button with a practiced flick, as Lucy grabs him again as he seems to think about pulling away. She can’t let him go, she has to make sure Wyatt and Rufus have gotten the mark to safety, and while there is a voice in the back of her head noting wryly that there is no requirement for her to play the part nearly this well, she doesn’t care. She suspects that Flynn might know perfectly well he’s being played – probably has some backup plan in mind – but as long as she keeps him cut off, he can’t get started on that one either.

Logic. Sense. Calculated capitulation. That’s all this is.

His mouth tastes of cigarette smoke and the stinging burn of moonshine and some dark, musky cologne. Lucy’s leg rides up on his hip, her fingers knotting into his neckerchief to pull him down against her. He kisses like a starving man. He’s already told her that he isn’t planning on going back to his wife and daughter if he somehow manages to bring them back to life, to reverse the irreversible, mend the unmendable. Has been fighting all this time – however misguidedly, however violently – with absolutely no expectation of a reward or a reunion. Just to know they’re alive again, far away from him, and the darkness he won’t bring to their door.

That, however much danger and trouble Garcia Flynn has already caused for Lucy and her friends and how much more he is certain to add to that tally, is, admittedly, a singular kind of love. So maybe he’s dreaming tonight. Maybe just once, he’s pretending this is his reward instead.

(Lucy never had much of a social life in college. Always too busy studying. There’s a priggish schoolmarm voice in her head, telling her that this is a Very Bad Idea – and another part of her that wonders, just once, what it would be like to do something stupid. Which this very _very_ much is.)

(Perhaps she wants him to be her mistake.)

Flynn’s hand is well advanced in its explorations beneath her skirt, as Lucy rolls her hips toward him and he fingers the lacy trim of the silk panties, as their eyes lock in silent challenge – and then she arches again, hand sliding down over his, pressing him against her, as she grinds against the friction of his callused thumb. She gulps a gasp, and even he looks somewhat less in command of himself than usual. Shakes his head like a dog shedding water, and starts to let go, to pull back, as if this has been fun, but there’s still someone out there he needs to kill.

Heaven forbid that Garcia Flynn forgets who he needs to kill. Even in the face of such delicious temptation as this.

“Oh no,” Lucy breathes, leaning forward, catching his earlobe with her teeth, hand cupping his neck, pulling him back. “I didn’t say we were finished yet, did I?”

His dark eyes gleam challengingly. His voice is a hoarse murmur. “You’re playing with fire tonight, aren’t you, Lucy?”

Yes, she thinks. Yes, maybe she is. The good, the wise, the sensible, the rational Lucy Preston. Suddenly she wonders if this is written in the journal as well, if he’s been waiting for this – but somehow she doesn’t think so. The look of shock on his face when she leaned over the table and kissed him – even Flynn isn’t _that_ good an actor. She was the one who pulled him back here, who is – and this is the worst part – barely needing to pretend. She’s an adult. She knows that you have sex with terribly unsuitable people, in less-than-advisable ways, for less-than-honorable reasons. Everyone does.

This, though –

This may take the cake.

She can still stop. She can still say no. Trust that there are other ways to keep him off Wyatt and Rufus’ trail, just long enough. But just then, her father’s face flashes into her head. Amiable, smiling, easy-going Benjamin Cahill. Telling her that Rittenhouse isn’t a choice. It’s blood. She’s trapped, destined, doomed to fall no matter what. Walking into the snare, eyes wide open.

You know what, Lucy thinks.

Fuck Rittenhouse.

_Fuck Rittenhouse._

And for all his manifold and one other flaws, the man whose rough thumb is playing in circles over her clit, making her whimper involuntarily, hates Rittenhouse like nothing else, like no one else, in the world. Literally.

Something breaks in her, then. Something snaps. She claws harder at Flynn, shifting their weight, as his hand comes up under her thigh and lifts her again, and her fingers fumble at his belt, yanking it undone and sliding under his pleated trousers. She can feel the weight of the gun in his pocket (actually not a metaphor in this case, though he is beyond all doubt happy to see her) and reaches in, fishes it out, and slides it onto the floor. Flynn grunts, but doesn’t try to stop her. That is the thrill of this, this is _power,_ and to her utter chagrin and confusion, Lucy loves it. This is the master criminal, the terrorist, the vigilante who’s been wrecking history left and right – or trying, at least – and she’s calling all the shots. Completely in command. It dementedly occurs to her that maybe they’re right, maybe they’re all right. This is Rittenhouse, and it wants to own everything it touches. Own him. Them. Anything else she wants.

Flynn nips at her neck, almost hard enough to draw blood, as Lucy skims down the silk underthings along her slender thigh, as they shift again and there is not much further they can possibly go before there’s no way to turn back. He nudges at her, ever so slightly – God, he is hard, and God, she is wet, and the touch of their naked skin, half of him and half of her, is doing increasingly terrible things to her self control. She hooks a hand around his leg, fingernails leaving marks, as his eyes meet hers in a question. Their mouths are wet and raw from kissing, but his lips still shape around her name.

In answer, she drags him against her, between her legs, rasping at her. He presses briefly, then slips half an inch inside, and Lucy’s toes curl in her beaded slippers, as she swallows an outcry and gets a better hold on the back of his neck, bracing herself, pressing his face into her shoulder as she wraps her other arm around his back. It has been a long time. A very, _very_ long time.

She’s not going to tell Wyatt and Rufus about this, to say the least. Or Agent Christopher. Or anyone.

Flynn swears in some language that isn’t English, as Lucy’s head falls back, as he shoves hard enough to seat himself inside her at a stroke, pinning her and filling her at just the edge of a stretching, sweet burn. Her hips thud solidly against the worn wallpaper. Someone is going to walk into the back corridor any moment and find them here – not the first tryst they’ve ever interrupted, surely, but still not one that will make them any friends. They have to be quick, this is utter lunacy anyway, and Lucy half-comforts herself by thinking that at least it’ll be done in a moment more. Her nails rake through the sweaty dark hair at the nape of his neck, pulling him inside her as far as she can take him for a few rough, raw, rousing thrusts that make her see stars – and then, as his breath shudders out of him and he seems on the verge of surrendering himself to her completely, he withdraws with a half-angry wrench, slick against her thigh, eyes still fixed unblinkingly on hers in the dim light of the gas lamps. A faint, sardonic smile curls his lips.

“Lucy,” he whispers, with that slight, mocking caress he always gives her name, the way it tastes almost exotic on his tongue. Her leg is still up on his hip, his face very close to hers, the weight of him still lingering in her, the shape of their bodies twisted in one, this strange creature that they are, who have followed each other through time and have no home left for either of them to return to. His fingers stroke the inside of her knee. “I know what you’re doing.”

 

**II.**

There are ten things you need to know about the Constitutional Convention, May 1787, in Philadelphia:

1\. Alexander Hamilton really does talk that much.

2\. There is absolutely no way that Thomas Jefferson _isn’t_ a member of a fledgling seven-year-old secret society, colloquially known as “Rittenhouse,” after the surname of its founder.

3\. In fact, there are several more, and this is their first real meeting.

4\. It is, also and therefore, a perfect target for someone who might want to, say, burst into the meeting hall and open fire, wrecking American history and Rittenhouse’s foundations altogether.

5\. Not that this fits the bill of anyone the team knows.

6\. Ironically, it’s been really hard to get Rufus to stop humming “My Shot” under his breath.

7\. Wyatt can certainly wear a frock coat. Even if he thinks he can’t.

8\. It’s been complete hell trying to avoid George Washington, as he would absolutely recognize them from those said seven years ago, and the questions will be, to say the least, awkward.

9\. (There may be odder job problems in the world, but not many).

10\. And then this, of course – Lucy’s corset half unlaced, her woolen stocking sliding down her leg, sunlight spilling on the rough floorboards as the traffic of horses and carts and newspaper-sellers and costermongers and the humming commerce of a country about to be founded passes by on the muddy streets outside, in the verdant greenery of early summer, the sleek black AK-47 in the corner, and Garcia Flynn’s fingers curling under the crook of her knee.

“Are you going to insist this is just an accident again, Lucy?”

She ignores him. She hasn’t found it necessary to quarrel with what works, and she knew he was going to get here sooner or later – in fact, she’s almost surprised that this wasn’t his first target. If she can keep him here instead of mowing down the Founding Fathers with a modern machine gun (even if, in _someone’s_ opinions, they could do with a good mowing down) she’s going to. She gives him a coy little smile, rather than answering.

(New Orleans has stuck in her head. A little too much.)

(If you do something wrong once, it’s a mistake. Forgivable.)

(Twice, it’s a little bit less so.)

“Just going to pretend we’ll always be jumping after each other through history?” he goes on, when she doesn’t answer. Slides between her knees, running both hands up her calves, to her thighs. Pushes her skirts up, moving closer. It’s a miracle anyone ever gets all their clothes off to – well, you know – in the eighteenth century. Alexander Hamilton doubtless has some tips.

“We could make this easier.” Flynn thumbs the inside of the cut of her leg, tracing ever so lightly over her wetness, as Lucy gulps down a breath and forces herself not to make a sound. “Still haven’t told the other two, have you? About how you think you’re keeping me distracted?”

Lucy gives him another tight little smile, as if to point out that apples for apples, Flynn is very distracted, and doesn’t seem to mind that he is. She drapes one leg over his shoulder, tugging him closer, as his finger finds her entrance beneath the skirt, and slides into her to the first knuckle. Their eyes remain locked on each other, as Flynn ghosts a dark chuckle against her leg and slides in a second finger, stretching her, testing her, moving his hand with deliberate slowness. Her breath stutters.

Wyatt and Rufus will wonder. She knows they will. She should tell them, she has to tell them, she needs them to wake her up, to make her stop. They saved the man Flynn was after in New Orleans, though. Averted the mega-Depression he was trying to trigger. If this works, if it does, if she almost thinks it’s tidier, easier, more ethical, to do things this way rather than racking up more bodies in the streets, well –

Flynn continues to explore her with one hand, the other holding her waist, as he moves closer. Bends down to lick at her, tongue between her legs, as it curls lightly and flicks at her clit, enough to make a traitorous moan shudder out of her. Continues to keep up a gentle but relentless pressure, heat building low in Lucy’s stomach as she almost pushes him away, almost snatches up her skirts, almost runs –

Almost.

Again, he laughs. Draws out his slick fingers, stands up slowly. Looks down at her bodice coming loose, the thick locks of dark hair lying tumbled on her shoulders. It is utterly impossible to read this man, and if Lucy had any sense – if she truly was Rittenhouse, perhaps – she’d grab the gun herself and hold him down. Finish him off. No matter how good his reasons, this man is still a wanted terrorist and criminal mastermind who isn’t going to stop until the world is burning behind him, and obviously as soon as they walk out of this room, they are back to being enemies. He’s here to fuck shit up, per usual. She can’t let him. She is saving the Founding Fathers from a massacre by letting Che Guevara give her a handjob. Far from glamorous. Defensible. Good.

She rises to her feet. Smooths her hands down the front of his white shirt; his cravat is off, the first few buttons undone. She gives him a chill ice-queen smile. Dares him to think he can get the better of her, of them, again.

He’s still only one man. And he’s going to lose.

But Lucy Preston isn’t going to let him get on with his idiocy just yet. She’s tired of cleaning up his messes. Incredibly tired, in fact. Of having to save everyone he might just kick off, of putting back together the pieces, of – just as he says – chasing him through history, one day after another. This ends. It will.

She slides her hands down to his hips, toying at the lacing of his breeches. Presses herself against him, then pulls his head down to hers, kissing him deep and hard and hungrily, as Flynn responds in kind and they are almost entangled, clawing, devouring, as they walk back to the bed and topple onto it together, as she stretches atop him. Straddles him, rides on him, hard and heavy between her legs, as she slides one hand into her pocket, and grabs what’s inside.

Smooth as Harry Houdini. No problem at all.

Flynn doesn’t notice at first. Just when he tries to move his hand to get better hold of her head, and it rattles to a halt, caught in the cuff. Lucy bites down a brief and stupid urge to apologize as she locks the other cuff around the bedstead. It isn’t going to hold him forever, but it’ll give them some time. She rolls off him, fumbling for her skirts. It is hell to lace up a corset on your own, especially with the FBI’s #1 Most Wanted staring holes through you. He seems amused at first – and then, as he can’t get free, angry.

“Lucy.” He rattles at the cuff. “Lucy, don’t be stupid. Lucy. Lucy!”

She doesn’t answer.

“LUCY!”

She lets herself out, shuts the door, locks it, and runs.

 

**III.**

It is April 17, 1912, and RMS _Titanic_ has just docked safely in New York City, fresh off her maiden voyage – there were ice warnings, but thanks to a mysterious transmission sent on the night of the 14th, a transmission nobody can trace or even quite understand, the ship was compelled to change course and slow down. Its passengers, including some of the creme-de-la-creme of high society – John Jacob Astor, Benjamin Guggenheim, Isidor and Ida Straus, Cosmo Gordon Duff, Molly Brown, Dorothy Gibson, and more – have just disembarked, and the dockyards are busy. The day is pale and sunny. A huge crowd has gathered to marvel at the sleek black steamer, jewel of the White Star Line, smoke still huffing from its four funnels.

In a brownstone hotel a few steps off the New York Port Authority, in a dim back room suffused with the scent of cigarette smoke and Macassar hair oil, Lucy Preston says quietly, “What the hell did you do that for?”

Flynn gives her a twisted smile. “I can’t save lives now, instead of taking them?”

“Please.” Lucy suspects Astor and Guggenheim at least were (are) Rittenhouse, probably high-ups, and Flynn wants them alive so he can pump them for information, disrupt their projects, tap their extensive list of contacts – smoke the roaches out of the rushes. “This is like the _Hindenburg,_ isn’t it? About perhaps who was supposed to go back on the return trip?”

Flynn lifts one shoulder in a magnificently contemptuous shrug. “Ah,” he says. “The _Hindenburg._ Beginning of such a beautiful relationship, wasn’t it?”

He does something with his eyes to her that makes her feel as if she’s not wearing anything, despite the silk dress and fur wrap and pinned hat. Lucy can feel her flush in her throat, closing off her breath. He doesn’t appear to bear an outstanding grudge against her for chaining him to a bed in 1787, though at least none of the Founding Fathers got capped in the ass that time, so –

“Tell me,” she says, “and I’ll leave.”

He grins. Even more darkly than last time.

“Make me.”

Lucy gives him a demure _don’t you wish_ smile, even as she’s moving closer toward him, turning herself into his space, raising one gloved hand as if to flick a speck of dust off the shoulder of his pinstriped suit jacket. She reaches up and takes hold of his felt trilby, pulling it off and setting it aside, even as his breath catches rather satisfyingly. Femme fatale isn’t a role she plays naturally, but just now, it comes to her as easily as sliding a knife between his ribs. Leans very close and whispers, “We both know I could _make_ you.”

“Lucy, Lucy, Lucy.” This appears to delight him inordinately, even as he swings her around and pins her to the wall, the length of his body pressing against hers, knee between her legs. As if this is what he has been waiting for since the moment he got hold of her journal (however he did) and thought they were destined to do great things together. “Taken you long enough, hasn’t it?”

“Oh, you’re mistaken.” Lucy thumbs the dark stubble on his chin. “I want something. Give it to me.”

“And what do you want, exactly?”

She leans still closer. Breathes against his cheek. “Information.”

“I think it’s more than that now, isn’t it?”

She opens her mouth to say no, because what else would she say? Sensibly say? _Third time’s the charm –_ and this, no, this has already gone far enough. There’s no point in distracting him this time, no tactical advantage to a delay. He’s not here to kill someone (at least, yet) like he was in 1929 and 1787. This, therefore. This is just about _wanting._ No good excuse.

Maybe this will stop it. Maybe this will turn it off.

Lucy is about to say something else. Probably important. She doesn’t get that far, because Flynn kisses her.

It’s rough, hungry, demanding, brusque, dangerous, uncontrolled – all, in fact, rather like the man himself. As if this is the long, slow-burning spark she lit when she kissed him the first time (which technically will not happen for another seventeen years – welcome to time travel) in New Orleans. As if they’ve danced and darted around each other long enough, and now this is this, that is that, and he’s completely through with waiting.

They take half a breath, and then turn their heads and go after each other ferociously again, stumbling down the narrow hall and crashing through a door into a small smoking parlor beyond – chaise longue upholstered in slightly moth-eaten green velvet, blown-glass lamps, dim in half-closed curtains. Flynn kicks the door shut and throws a heavy andiron after it; he’s clearly not about to risk any interruptions. Lucy is completely breathless, hair coming out of its elegant updo, as they are barely able to tear themselves apart long enough for him to wrench his belt undone with one hand, as she kicks up her skirts. She sinks onto the chaise as he comes down with her, as their mouths are bruised from kissing too hard to breathe, hands all over, gripping, yanking, pulling. He bears her backwards, bunching a fistful of skirt, finding his way to the old-time underwear and efficiently getting it out of the way, as Lucy kicks it off her foot. Then in half a breath more, she’s on her back on the chaise, legs akimbo, and he kneels between them, doesn’t even bother to get his trousers the rest of the way off, and thrusts half-violently into her.

Lucy’s breath is punched back into her throat as he leans forward, bracing himself on his elbows, pushing her hips wider with his own as he slides deeper, as she jerks up her head and he practically bites her lips off, tongue prodding into her mouth and muffling her whispered, _“Jesus.”_ He is solid and hot and very hard, and he fills her just to that point of sweet burning, as he did before. She clutches tight around him, spasming, as he draws out half an inch and then plunges back, their entangled bodies making slick wet soft sounds, as he comes to rest hilt-deep inside her, bites her shoulder, and both of them buck half up off the chaise. He gives her a moment, but only that. Then he starts to move.

He fucks her in compact, powerful, rutting bursts, square and savage, with an extra twist of his hips at the end to be sure he’s hitting her as deep as he possibly can. She claws at his back, his straining shoulders, one hand on his dark head, as the carved feet of the chaise thump against the floor with the force of their motion. He drags himself against her, with absolutely insolent thoroughness, then buries once more, as Lucy can barely stand the heat and friction and burning drive of it. He rasps slickly against her. Doesn’t quit or pull back a single one of them. One leg links around his back, and the other struggles to dig for purchase, to anchor her to the world. She seems to have somehow lost her hold altogether.

At last, Flynn gives a final jerk and shove, and Lucy feels herself about to be dragged over, then free-falling, as her world goes white and hot and melted and there’s a thousand exploding suns in her belly and her breast and her brain and every other bit of her. She claws and clings and swears. Burns.

She comes back to earth slowly, breathing as if she’s been chased by a train, to see him staring down at her as if he’s trying to memorize her face, how she looked just then, to keep it in whatever tarnished jewel-box of memories he holds away from the rest of his darkness. She just lies there, gasping, until at last, slowly, they disentangle themselves. She sits up, fumbling herself back into place. She is slick and raw and very well-fucked. She can still feel it echoing through every sinew of her.

“Tell me,” she says again, after a momentary struggle to make the words work. “What you’re doing.”

He shrugs. As if to say he has no secrets from her, never has. Has always been completely open about what he intends to do, and what he hopes for her. “You know what I’m doing, Lucy.”

She does, at that. She thinks of the fact that even with every ulterior motive in the world, Flynn has saved over two thousand lives – everyone who was supposed to die on the _Titanic,_ and didn’t. All the children they will have, the grandchildren, who would never otherwise have been born – the things they will do, see, invent, experience. The change to history is beyond comprehension.

And yet. Insisting that they die, that things go back to one way they happened to play out, out of all the countless thousands of possibilities – doesn’t that make her the monster?

They’ve chased Flynn all this time to stop him from hurting people. What the hell does she do with this now, instead? Where does she even begin to work it out? She is facing the utterly unknown, uncharted, unfathomable. Remembers her insistence that Lincoln had to die, it was how it had to be, and Rufus and Wyatt’s incredulity that they just had to sit back and let it. And when push came to shove, when it was in front of her –

She looks over at the man who shot Lincoln, and gets to her feet, letting her skirts fall. Shaky-legged and watery-kneed, needs to steady herself on the chaise. “You know,” she says, half in a whisper. “You know we won’t let you. No matter what.”

He seems amused. Not in the least surprised. “Oh, of course,” he says, getting to his feet, and pulling his trousers up, doing up his belt. “But not for much longer. You’re going to join me soon, Lucy. Trust me.”

And with that, he actually leans over and kisses her cheek, half-genuinely-affectionately, as if he’s going to pick up milk from the store and wants to know if she needs anything while he’s out. Pulls on his jacket, straightens his cravat. As she stands there, shaken and silent and still undone to the flesh, the blood, the bone, he lets himself out, closes the door behind him, and is gone.

 

**IV.**

The winter of 1838 in the state of Illinois is the coldest that anyone remembers. The rivers and ponds are frozen over a foot thick, and it snows every two or three days. The whiteness would be almost pure, if it wasn’t pocked and pitted with bloodstains from the starving, straggling, nearly-barefoot Cherokee Indians being forced to march by armed U.S. militiamen, evicted from their ancestral homelands east of the Mississippi River, to accommodate a gold rush and expanding settlement in the states of Georgia, Kentucky, and Tennessee. President Andrew Jackson signed the order; President Martin Van Buren is seeing it carried out. It will become known as _nu na hi du na tlo hi lu i_. Or rather and more simply, the Trail of Tears.

Lucy, Wyatt, and Rufus, dressed in layers of fur and wool and greased leather and blankets, are still freezing solid. They are face to face with one of the ugliest and most unforgivable episodes in all of American history, and none of them are entirely certain what to do. Flynn went here straightaway after saving the _Titanic,_ and he hasn’t turned up just yet. Wyatt and Rufus are staring at the huddled, shivering, sick Indians, herded by armed men on horseback, with looks of total horror, and Lucy can’t blame them in the least. She is the one who’s along to make sure history happens as it is supposed to. That is her job.

This, though.

This is absolutely terrible.

“I – ” She clears her throat, chokes on the cold air, and coughs. “I’ll go looking. Flynn might want to prevent the Indian removals from happening, provoke an outright war between them and the settlers. That way, the country is even more divided running up to the Civil War, and the Union won’t be able to – ”

“Probably,” Wyatt says, clearly not listening, as he keeps staring at the Indians. “Lucy, we… are we really supposed to just – what? Leave them like this?”

Lucy flinches. She is very close to grabbing a musket and shooting down one of the soldiers herself, like that’s going to do anything. This is the same paradox as with the _Titanic –_ do they still have to stop Flynn if he does something objectively decent, saves lives, even if it’s in the interest of further destabilizing American history? What cost – her soul? – is it going to take if she stands and turns a blind eye and lets this happen, because America might be destroyed altogether by the Civil War if she doesn’t?

Doesn’t this _deserve_ to be destabilized?

“I’ll go look for Flynn,” she repeats, barely above a whisper. “You guys sneak in there and at least see if you can – “

Rufus gives her a strange look. “Go look for Flynn,” he says. “Again. By yourself.”

“It’s working, isn’t it?”

“Is that all it is?”

Lucy opens her mouth, doesn’t know what to say, what she can possibly. She can’t tell them, but she hates keeping secrets from them. Surely they must suspect something. They spend enough time together, they know she’s turned oddly evasive and noncommittal on the whole subject. Still, though. This –

She’s still trying to say something, anything. She’s interrupted by a gunshot.

All at once, the camp turns into chaos as half a dozen men on horseback, dressed in black with bandanas over their faces and cowboy hats pulled low, gallop in, opening fire with the distinctive rat-a-tat-tat of modern machine guns. Lucy’s heart vaults into her mouth as she, Wyatt, and Rufus duck and run, preparing to try to shield the Indians, only for them to realize that the newcomers – they must be Flynn and his cohorts, who else would have AK-47s in the nineteenth century? – aren’t shooting at the Indians. They’re shooting only, and intently, at the soldiers, who are yelling and scrambling and bracing to fight back, but whose balky single-bore muskets are barely a match for the weaponry they’re faced with. And at that, somehow, something in Lucy snaps.

She breaks from cover, runs, grabs one of the muskets from where it’s leaning against a log, and doesn’t even know how to fire it, apart from the rudimentary. Points it, manages to cock it, and feels the incredible, jerking kick through her entire body as it goes off, almost deafening her. One of the soldiers yells and somersaults off his horse. She did that. Shot him. Like she did Jesse James, but this – James was going to die anyway. Who knows if this man was supposed to. It doesn’t matter. She’s crossed the Rubicon, she’s acted to consciously interfere and change history because she wasn’t going to let the injustice stand.

It’s happening.

She’s turning into him.

Just like he said.

Lucy’s frigid hands are numb on the polished-wood barrel. She has no idea how to reload, even as someone yells, points at her, and appears to take exception to the death of his friend. But then the next instant, one of the men on horseback gallops up, almost casually shoots him through the back of the head, and holds a hand down to Lucy. Familiar dark eyes gleam at her beneath the snowy brim of the cowboy hat. “Morning, _ma’am_.”

Lucy wants to say something, wants to yell at him – but the camp is still in total uproar, and instinct drives her to grab his hand, as he hauls her up on the horse in front of him and puts his arms around her. “Take the reins!”

“What, so you can shoot more people?” Lucy has to raise her voice over the crack and strafe of more machine-gun fire, even as the Indians, realizing this is some sort of rescue, are grabbing up their things and trying to run. “Are you –”

Flynn gives her one of those _looks_ he does so well, shrugs, and swings the butt of the rifle to his shoulder, even as Lucy has no choice but to grab the reins or be pitched off in the tumult. She catches half a glimpse of Wyatt and Rufus trying to get the Indians to go, for however far they’ll get before news of the attack spreads. She feels numb and stunned (or maybe that’s just the searing cold) as Flynn takes aim, shoots down the guard in the rough-hewn watchtower built at the perimeter of the camp, and regards his handiwork with satisfaction. “Feels good, doesn’t it?” he says in her ear. “Destroying the bastards who deserve to be destroyed?”

Lucy doesn’t answer, in part because she can’t deny that this is exactly what she feels. It might not alter the entire outcome of the Indian removals, of the injustice of it – but try as she might, she can’t bring herself to wish that she did differently, even knowing that she’s on the verge of becoming the same sort of historical wrecking ball as him. Oh God. Oh, God. It is happening.

Flynn slings the rifle back over his shoulder, then canters off through the snow, her still clutching to the saddle, to the small log cabin on the far side of the clearing. He reins in, swings down, and pulls her off after him, shoving through the door and into the one tiny, dank, woodsmoke-smelling room beyond. Lucy stands shivering and dripping snow as he bends down, stacks some of the damp sticks of wood in the earthen hearth, takes out a modern lighter, and gets a fire going. “There,” he says, with considerable self-satisfaction. “Unless you wanted to get warm some other way?”

She chokes slightly at his presumption, even as she can’t resist moving closer; she is absolutely frozen through, and the warmth is heavenly. She stretches out her hands, feeling sensation slowly return, as he watches her with hooded eyes, leaning with studied casualness against the wall. Wyatt and Rufus will come back any minute, unless they haven’t realized just yet that they lost her in the uproar. Or they could be making sure the Indians get to safety. Anything.

“You shot the man, Lucy,” her companion says, after a moment. “You’ve gone past the point of no return, now. I told you.”

“I’m not interested in having this conversation.”

Flynn raises an eyebrow. “Fine. We don’t have to talk.”

“What – what happened in New York, it was completely a – “

“An accident?” He laughs, low and rough and derisive. “An _accident,_ Lucy? Do you really think that? After everything that’s happened between us, do you think anything about this is accidental? You and I – we’re destined, somehow. I don’t know how, I don’t know why. But you knew all the places I picked out in history. I care about it as much as you do. I know why it matters. And now you’ve had a taste, you’ve seen you don’t have to just sit back and let stupid and terrible and pointless things happen in the name of some evil, idiotic larger purpose. This is power. This is what you’re meant for.”

“That’s what my father said to me.” Lucy doesn’t look at him. Doesn’t dare. “About Rittenhouse. About how I’d come to it, one way or another.”

Flynn considers, then shrugs. Takes a step. She is horribly aware of his proximity, and the way her heart is racing madly beneath the shawl. “I think you’re choosing a side right now, aren’t you?”

Lucy turns to look at him, which is a mistake. He is very close to her now, and the expression on his face is – soft, almost. Utterly intent. She can feel the heat of his breath on her cheek, the warmth of the flames still on her back. He reaches out both hands, puts them flat against the wall on either side of her head, leaning down. And she’s lifting up her face, rising on her tiptoes despite herself, meeting him halfway, as they – for the first time, slowly, conscientiously, carefully – bring their mouths to touch.

Flynn is almost gentle as he kisses her this time, as his hands start venturing beneath the still-dripping wraps, getting just enough of the clothes out of the way to find his way in, and she gasps as his warm, rough hand cups the cold curve of her breast. His fingers trail down, seeking an invitation, not opposed to creating their own if necessary, and her leg comes up, foot braced on the woodpile, to lift her skirt. She is so very, very cold, and she wants so much to be warm, in any way that might present itself. Her fingers clutch at the wet wool of his jacket, sliding beneath, running along his chest, urging him closer.

He drops to his knees in front of her, pushing aside her skirts and drawers, hands bracing her thighs, as he leans forward and licks a rough stripe between her legs, in her wetness, that makes her moan. She can feel the buzz of his dark chuckle against her exquisitely sensitive folds, as he sets to his work with his customary cool, deliberate thoroughness. He does seem to enjoy this, giving her pleasure without thinking to ask any particular reciprocation, the relentless heat and pressure and insistence of his mouth like nothing and no one she’s been with before. Her breath stutters. She grips at his hair, pushing him deeper, as his tongue enters her and plays about. Kisses her inside, then moves up in slow, light motions to her clit. He has plenty to do to that too.

Lucy gulps, feeling nothing but searing heat dazzling through her, any idea or memory of cold completely obliterated. Once Flynn is finished with his very thorough exploration of her, he kisses the cut of her leg, running his hands down the backs of her thighs. Seems almost at peace, as if he might not quite care so much about what he does wherever he goes, but rather in that the knowledge that she will follow him, and this, however much she is still trying to deny it, is very likely to happen again. That he has ever so slightly altered his tactics, until she’s started to support him. Act of her own volition to help him.

This is surreal. She could still stop it. She could.

She doesn’t.

She tugs him to his feet, tastes herself on his lips as he leans in to kiss her, and starts to fumble at the complicated buttons of his trousers. Wants him in her, roused and slippery and quivering and wet as she is, wants whatever this is, wants it. He shifts, tugging them down over his hips, and she reaches for him,  caresses him with her thumb, hears him actually gasp as she circles the tip. Then he claims her with a quick, deep, matter-of-fact thrust, and she cries out.

Flynn lets out an even more self-satisfied sigh as he slides fully into her – the third time now, this is hardly a novel experience, and yet its attraction does not appear to be waning in the least. Both of them take a moment, as he closes his eyes and allows himself to absorb the sensation of completion, of possession. He is preparing to start to move, as Lucy rolls her hips on him, urging him to it – when, just then, the door of the cabin flies open.

Flynn jerks out of her lightning-fast, yanks his trousers back up, and spins around. Not quite fast enough.

 _“You,”_   Wyatt Logan says, grim and furious, pointing the gun. “Get away from her right now.”


	2. Chapter 2

**V.**

 For a long and hideously unpleasant moment, nobody says anything. Flynn has moved to shove Lucy behind him, but she pushes his arm down, even as Wyatt stares at them as if he can’t quite believe what he’s seeing (and honestly, who can blame him?) The gun swings to point at Flynn, who of course starts to go for his own, but at that, Lucy’s paralysis breaks. “No! _Both_ of you! Stop!”

“Lucy – “ Wyatt and Flynn say in unison, exasperated by her insistence on continually delaying each other from blowing the other’s brains out. Such is her sway, however, that they do as told, though with looks warning each other that they had better not start thinking they’re off the hook here. It’s Wyatt who seems inclined to press the point. “Is this – what the hell is – Flynn, I swear, if you’ve laid a single _finger_ on her – “

“Oh, more than that.” Trust Garcia Flynn to be a smug dick while being held at not-quite-gunpoint by a trained Delta Force operative who has plenty of reasons, political and personal, to drop him on the spot. “Quite a bit more than that, repeatedly. So, Lucy. You still haven’t told them about us?”

Lucy’s face burns. She doesn’t know what’s worse – the fact that Wyatt found out like this, that Rufus is about to know as well, or that she’s going to have to possibly come up with some remote shred of explanation. Which, it goes without saying, she does not have. She shoots a long look at Wyatt, silently begging him to keep his cool; he does, though a muscle in his cheek is twitching with something that isn’t amusement. She can see it dawning on him that she wasn’t forced here, that Flynn didn’t swoop in and sweep her up like he did in 1780, didn’t spirit her off to whatever ravishment and misadventure he had in mind (which is probably still quite a bit, come to think). No, she came (yeah, she came, all right) of her own free will, and no, she hasn’t told them.

“Let’s go,” Wyatt says curtly, reaching out an instinctive arm to shield her, as if from any belated attempts by Flynn to pounce on her from the rear. Lucy half-glances back at him, but he isn’t looking at her. A muscle is going in his cheek as well, and he turns sharply away, staring back at the struggling fire in the hearth. There is obviously nothing to say, that can be said.

She follows Wyatt out without a word.

”Let me get this straight,” Rufus repeats, in tones of patent, incredulous, barely-enough-of-a-word-for-it disbelief. “Lucy’s been boinking Flynn on the side for about the past three missions? _Flynn_ Flynn? Same guy, right? The cuckoo-luckoo terrorist with every issue they have and some they haven’t invented yet, who, you know, tried to get Scarface to kill me back in Chicago? _That_ Flynn? Just so we’re clear?”

“Rufus, I…” They’re back in 2017, though Lucy increasingly wonders why they even bother doing it. True, it’s the only place they can recharge the Lifeboat, but it’s not like they can stroll into Mason Industries – or pretty much anywhere else someone might recognize them and turn them in – with Rittenhouse up everyone’s ass. They are fugitives here, personae non gratae, strangers to their own time. _Fugitives like Flynn._ “I didn’t know how to tell you.”

Wyatt closes his eyes briefly. “Lucy,” he says. “You know it’s not my business to police who you sleep with. But this – ”

“I was getting the vibe that something was up.” Rufus takes a restorative guzzle of his beer; they’re in some shit hole-in-the-wall restaurant and bar in Oakland, chowing down on big, delicious, greasy burgers and performing an unpleasantly in-depth autopsy on Lucy’s suddenly very fascinating love life. “What with you insisting on going to find him by yourself.”

“It worked,” Lucy says, cheeks still stinging, and about to point out that since they recruited her to cover their asses on stealing the Lifeboat to save Jessica – something she did, by the way – the least they could do is cut her a little slack on this one. Not that it makes any sense, not even to her, and a scientist and a soldier, whose lives are run by sense and logic and reason and clear-cut answers, aren’t exactly going to offer to hold her hand and braid her hair on this one. They both love her, but this is a lot to swallow. “Whatever I did to keep him out of the way – we achieved what we were there for, didn’t we?”

“Him, evidently,” Rufus says ironically, taking another bite of burger. “You did him.”

Lucy decides it wise to get very interested in her own dinner, even as Wyatt’s eyes perform the customary flick around to see if anyone has been watching or listening too long. None of them can really go home, as Rittenhouse would pounce, and it’s only by staying as far away from their families, or rather, Lucy’s mom and Rufus’s mom and brother (and Jiya), that they can hope not to give Rittenhouse any initiative to use them in a sting. It’s still a terrible risk to run, and it’s making Lucy reckless. She wants them gone. She wants them to stop threatening to hurt people she cares about. She’s tired of them getting what they want.

She’s almost willing to start pushing the boundaries on it. More than that.

“Maybe – and believe me, I can’t believe I’m saying this either – we could make this work for us,” Rufus goes on, when neither Wyatt nor Lucy have anything else to say. “If this is the way things are, can’t you, I don’t know, schtup him a few times and either accidentally turn him into a half-decent person, or…” He pauses. “Knock him out, and just… end this.”

“No!” Lucy’s refusal comes far too fast to be comfortable, as her fingers clench on her glass. “No, I… I don’t want to kill him.”

“Technically,” Wyatt points out, with more than a bit of an edge to his voice, “it’s my job to kill him.”

Rufus shoots him a look, as if to say that he’s aware that Wyatt, no matter how restrained he is trying to be about this, also has serious philosophical objections to the commencement of further _schtupping_ between Lucy and – well, anyone, but especially Flynn. “We could just send him to prison for the rest of his life. I’m guessing that’s not a fun time. Especially in, like, Russia.”

“If we do,” Lucy says quietly, “we lose all chance of taking down Rittenhouse, don’t we?”

Both of her companions look at her uneasily. No matter what reasons both Wyatt and Rufus have to detest Flynn personally, actually taking him out at this point is about as good as handing Rittenhouse a blank check for victory and whatever other terrifying things they have in mind, and both the men know it. Wyatt looks even more unhappy, and Lucy opens her mouth, almost intending to apologize – then swallows it back. She’s a grown woman. Whatever she does is her business. A bit more complicated in this case, yes, but still.

They finish dinner and head outside, not at the same time, to the separate hotels where they will be spending the night. They don’t dare get too in contact with Agent Christopher, though she’ll send them whatever she can from time to time. Can’t endanger her wife and daughter, and Rittenhouse is probably watching her as well, or trying. Their life is ever more lonely. Their options are running out.

Once Lucy has seen Wyatt and Rufus leave, she picks up her coat and walks out into the spring night. A heavy mist is rolling in from the waterfront, and she shivers. Reaches into her purse for her BART card, as public transit seems safer these days than a car that can have a bomb planted on it or its brakes cut –

“Hello, Lucy.”

She almost jumps out of her skin. She whirls around, heart hammering, to see – of course, it makes all the sense and none. She has never seen him in the present day. Only ever in the past, never in the here and now – and yet here he is, in a leather bomber jacket and stonewashed jeans, like the most wanted terrorist in America can just stroll into a dark parking lot in suburban Oakland and have a chat. His dark hair is as neatly parted as ever, his pose just as quietly arrogant. It is almost as strange as if one of the historical figures they’ve met along the way walked out into the modern world, Captain America unfrozen from the ice after seventy years. Knowing Flynn, he’d then try to shoot Captain fucking America directly in the head. Oh _God._

“What are you…” Lucy is actually clutching her chest. “How are you…”

Flynn shrugs. “I have to come back occasionally as well, you know. Besides. Emma wanted to pick up a few things at Walgreen’s.”

At that, a searing flash of jealousy burns through Lucy from head to heel, even though – as far as she knows – Emma Whitmore is just Flynn’s current pilot after Anthony was disposed of, and has plenty of her own reasons to want Rittenhouse taken down, hence her willingness to cooperate. But Lucy still hates it, and Flynn has been watching her face to see exactly that; if he wanted to get a rise out of her with that little throwaway, it’s painfully clear that he succeeded. He smirks. Jesus Christ, he is the actual worst. “Or,” he says, with that same affected casualness. “Perhaps you wanted to come with me tonight, Lucy?”

She does. She wants to. It’s there before she can even think of denying it – but just as much, she isn’t willing to up and abandon Wyatt and Rufus, especially when they already think, not without reason, that she is completely insane for doing this at all. She tries to swallow, to wet her parched throat, but she can’t. A siren goes by a few streets over, and she jumps again. “Just – go.”

“I don’t think that’s what either of us want me to do, Lucy.” He takes a step, blocking out the chilly wind that is raising goose prickles on her arms – she still hasn’t put on her coat. She takes a matching step back, and then another, until she abruptly runs into a brick wall in the side alley. His voice is a low murmur as he leans down toward her. “Do we?”

Lucy hates herself for turning her face up, for rising on her tiptoes, a hand coming up to caress the back of his neck – as their mouths meet, light and tender for half a moment, before it turns raw and starving on both their parts. They were interrupted most unceremoniously back in 1838, and he clearly intends to finish some business before he leaves tonight. She can’t believe it, she can’t, she always thought this was certainly something she would never do, but it’s like she’s drunk, giddy, a voice in her brain yelling at her to know better, but the rest of her body eager to shut it up. At once.

They rearrange just enough clothes to accomplish their objective, as Flynn pins her flat to the wall with a hard thrust and Lucy whimpers as her legs turn to jelly, taking him inside her like a woman dying of thirst in the desert. She wraps both arms around his neck, panting; oh god, let a cop drive up now, and they will be arrested for indecent acts in public, let alone the whole international-time-terrorist-and-fugitive-from-Homeland Security spice to the pot. He is clearly a man on a mission, filling her and possessing her without mercy, his mouth hot on her jaw and biting at her collarbone, licking at the curve of her breasts – he’s had considerable experience at getting eighteenth, nineteenth, and early-twentieth clothes out of the way by now, but not yet a good ol’ modern Victoria’s Secret bra. Lucy moans as he gives an extra and deliberate shove, playing at her, pulling back half an inch and then slamming to the hilt again. His hand is in her hair, her hips slapping against the bricks. She is going to be bruised tomorrow. She’s not sure she cares.

It only takes a few more rough, shuddering strokes before they’re both losing it, and as they’re going over, Flynn growls, _“Lucy”_ against her neck in a tone of voice that almost makes her lose her damn mind. Her mouth is open and raw and desperate for his, his tongue, the taste of him, even as he takes her with all his hardness and weight. He’s hot as a river of flame inside her. The world has tipped upside down and all the stars have been shaken out of the sky.

At last, they disentangle, as Flynn wipes his mouth with the back of his hand and Lucy appears to have two clumsy blocks of wood in place of hers. She sags back against the wall, gulping. She is not dealing with any of this.

“So,” he breathes. “Come with me.”

It sounds almost romantic. Enticing a girl to run off with her lover, to some unknown adventure. Somewhere, anywhere, _anywhen._ She’d just have to name the place and time. He’d take her there. Might even give up this entire damned-fool crusade of his.

But she doesn’t want him to.

She wants Rittenhouse taken down.

But not – no, not yet, she can’t, Wyatt and Rufus are the other two-thirds of her, she can’t fling them to the wind and run off with this – with _him_ –

“Please,” she whispers. “Flynn, just go. Go. Before someone sees you.”

He looks at her for a long, unendurable moment. For a man who always seems so supremely self-assured, he is just now, ever that bit, uncertain. Rattled, almost. He’s gotten used to going wherever he wants, doing whatever he wants, no rules, no restrictions. But he’s looking at her now as if the one thing he wants the most, the one person –

Well. Her he can’t have.

After a moment, when she closes her eyes hard and clenches her fists, giving herself the strength to stand by her decision, he nods. It’s clearly killing him, but he does. Turns on his heel, gives her half a bow, and vanishes like smoke into the night.

 

**VI.**

Lucy gets a cab to the hotel. She doesn’t feel up to a long ride on the train, and she badly needs to lie down. It’s late and it’s dark and her head is still rushing and every time she thinks about anything, it wants to split in half. It’s probably her imagination that the driver keeps looking at her in the rearview mirror, as if he’s seen her face somewhere recently and is trying to put two and two together. When they pull into the hotel, the kind of dismal cinder-block place where a hooker was probably murdered recently, she almost forgets to tip him in her haste to get out. Then as she is crossing the parking lot, she sees something – rather, someone – standing in the grim fluorescent lights by the front. A little girl about eight, thin and wet and shivering.

Lucy hesitates, then decides she can’t just walk by and pretend she didn’t see anything. “Hey,” she says gently. “Hey, honey, did someone drop you off here?”

The girl jumps and cringes. She blinks, then looks up at Lucy. “I’m cold.”

“Yeah, I see.” Lucy glances around. The parking lot is still deserted. A car backfires in the alley. It crosses her mind that Rittenhouse might really be trying to be as awful as possible and use a child for a sting agent, but… after a moment, she takes off her coat and wraps it around the little girl. “Is someone meeting you here?”

“I don’t know.” The girl continues to shiver. “I don’t know where to go.”

Lucy is about to call 911, the usual response in this situation, before she remembers that she really doesn’t want to see any cops right now. If the girl was dropped off by human traffickers or something else terrible, she is not about to stand by and do nothing, and she also doesn’t want to deal with this by herself. Besides, if that cab driver _was_ onto her, she doesn’t want to sit here and wait for the fuzz to turn up in the middle of the night. With that, she makes a decision. “Do you want to come with me?”

The girl considers, then gives a tiny nod. Lucy takes her hand, and starts to walk.

Forty-five minutes later, they’re standing in front of the absolutely shitty apartment Wyatt has rented under a fake name in another trailer-trash development, as he doesn’t want to keep changing hotels every time they’re back in the present. Lucy knocks, and when the door is opened a crack with the snout of a pistol pointing out, she hisses, “Jeez! Easy! It’s me!”

 _“Lucy?”_ The door jerks open further. “Is something – ” Just then, Wyatt catches sight of her plus-one, and stares. “What the _hell?”_

“I’m sorry. We need somewhere to lie low for the night. She was wandering around outside the hotel by herself, I couldn’t leave her.”

Wyatt still looks as if someone brained him with by a two-by-four, but shuts his mouth with a snap and beckons them inside, glancing around warily before closing the door and putting the deadbolt in. He’s in his undershirt and jeans, and the place is bare and dismal, but he takes charge of the runaway, warming up some pizza for her and encouraging her to eat it. He’s good with kids, Lucy thinks. He and Jessica probably planned to have some of their own one day. The little girl is still hesitant and shy, but warms a bit under his gentle, matter-of-fact attention. She has thick dark hair and dark eyes, and her clothes are slightly too small for her, worn and dirty. She clearly has escaped from some kind of a bad situation.

At last, when the girl has fallen asleep on the sofa cuddled against Wyatt’s side, and he’s clearly trying to think of how to move without waking her up, his phone buzzes abruptly on the card table he’s using as a dinette, startling him and Lucy. She reaches for it, swipes it open to see a text from Rufus, and winces. It feels almost personal. “Flynn’s jumped again.”

“What are we supposed to do about – ” Wyatt jerks his thumb at their guest. “Lucy, we can’t leave her here by herself in Felon Park, and we can’t seriously ask a _child_ to travel through time after an international terrorist. So what?”

“I don’t know,” Lucy says feebly. “Call Child Protective Services?”

Wyatt snorts. “Yeah. That would go really well. Get them up in our grill, in here, with _us?_ Listen. Maybe you should stay behind with her. Rufus and I will take care of Flynn this time.”

Lucy sits up straighter. “What? You don’t want me to come?”

Wyatt looks uncomfortable. Glances away. “Lucy, I just… _whatever_ has been going on with you and him, it’s still not been enough to stop him, has it? He’s still trying to hurt people, he’s still on his crusade, he’s… he’s not changing. I don’t know if you thought he would, or… or what. And if you’re there, it might… complicate it.”

“You mean I might stop you from shooting him on the spot?” Lucy’s voice rises. “Wyatt – ”

“Lucy.” He closes his eyes briefly. “The reason I was hired in the first place was to kill him. You know that.”

“Yes. By Mason Industries. We don’t work for Mason Industries anymore. And I told you! You can’t kill him! If you do, Rittenhouse wins! They all win! We can’t – we _can’t_ let that happen!”

Wyatt opens his eyes and looks at her steadily. “We can’t?” he repeats. “Or you can’t?”

“Right now,” Lucy says, “I don’t think it matters.”

Wyatt’s phone buzzes again. Another text from Rufus. _Any time this century, guys._

“We have to take her with us.” Lucy can’t see anything else for it. Maybe they can just tell her it was a fun adventure. She stands up, and Wyatt hesitates, then does the same, scooping the sleeping girl into his arms. “I’ll keep an eye on her, if that’s what you want. But Wyatt, promise me. _Promise_ me you won’t go after Flynn by yourself. We just stop what he’s there to do. As usual.”

“And let him off the hook to do it again.” Wyatt sounds tired. “Is this the way you want to live whatever time we have left, Lucy?”

She opens and shuts her mouth. She doesn’t know. She doesn’t know anything. Except this. It’s devouring, all-consuming, that no matter what, she cannot let Garcia Flynn die. “Promise,” she repeats, half-desperately. “Promise me.”

Wyatt keeps looking at her. His voice is very quiet.

“Fine,” he says. “I promise.”

A few hours later and a hundred and fifty-six years earlier, the team – and the little girl, whose name they still haven’t gotten, but who took surprisingly well to the idea of dressing up in fancy old clothes and getting into a clanking metal eyeball that is supposed to take them through time, sitting on Wyatt’s lap while Rufus muttered that he didn’t know they were now running a daycare – is stepping out into a dim, pungent back alley in London, December 1861. It is colder than a witch’s tit. This is only their second mission outside America, after Nazi Germany in the 1940s, and all of them are feeling a little out of their element. The fog is yellow and burns with coal smoke, the Thames reeks like an open sewer, carts and carriages and broughams clack by on filth-splattered cobblestones, and Lucy, in her bonnet and long dress and fur capelet and woolen gloves, keeps a tight hold on their charge’s hand. For her part, she’s looking around with wide-eyed interest. “Did we really,” she says. “Did we really travel through _time?_ That’s so cool.”

“You’re taking pretty well to this, kid.” Wyatt eyes her narrowly from beneath his fine beaver tophat. He turns up the collar of his overcoat; Jiya has managed to get them copies of the keys to the clothes warehouse, and conveniently scrambles the security cameras, so as long as they are very, _very_ careful, they can still dress to blend in on their various missions. “What are you, Baby Einstein?”

The girl looks up at him beneath her long eyelashes. “I like science,” she says, apparently by way of an explanation. “Grandma was a rocket scientist.”

“Cool,” Wyatt mutters, not paying attention, as they glance from side to side. London is covered in black bunting, and the newspapers are all sold out. It’s two days after the death of Queen Victoria’s beloved prince consort, Albert, and the entire country is in shock. “Lucy, what did you say you thought he was going to do? What, kill Victoria? Make it a clean sweep?”

“I don’t know. British history isn’t my specialty. Maybe Rittenhouse is trying to take advantage of Victoria’s grief, get her to make some kind of bargain with them while she wasn’t thinking straight – or her kids, perhaps, Victoria blamed her eldest son for Albert’s death. Could be they’re exploiting that feud somehow, making a deal with her to ensure that the monarchy survives, but they get to control it.” Lucy looks around restlessly. “Or – honey, what? Honey, come on.”

The little girl has stopped dead in her tracks, face white. “I don’t like Rittenhouse.”

The trio exchanges stunned, suspicious looks. None of them are sure what to say to that, even as they are increasingly convinced that her presence might be no accident at all. It’s Rufus who breaks the silence. “Trust me,” he informs her, “we _hate_ Rittenhouse.”

Wyatt looks at her flatly. “How do you know about them?”

The girl’s lip quivers, and she hides behind Lucy, who gives Wyatt a _she’s just a child_ look. Her heart is pounding for no good reason. “I’ll go to Buckingham Palace,” she says after a moment. “There will be a lot of reporters and looky-loos there, nobody will notice. See if I can pick up anything about whether there have been strange visitors recently. Someone pressuring the queen to do something, that kind of thing. You two, check the Houses of Parliament, Westminster.”

Rufus and Wyatt exchange a look, as if they are well aware that she is once more proposing that they split up, but after a moment, they nod. They catch a hansom cab going one direction, and Lucy and the girl get one going the other. As they bump and jolt along in the whiskey-smelling interior, Lucy says quietly, “You didn’t tell me your name.”

The girl glances up at her with an expression that is jarringly, hauntingly familiar, then back out the soot-streaked isinglass window. “I’m scared to.”

“Why is that?”

“Because you might try to hurt me.”

“Honey, I am not going to hurt you. I promise.” They jolt to a stop, Lucy opens the door and gets out, presses a few coins into the driver’s hand, and emerges to the sea of public grief before Buckingham Palace. It doesn’t look that different to when, say, Princess Diana died, flowers and tributes and handwritten notices of condolence. “But if we’re going to find your family when we get back, you have to tell me.”

The girl looks up, seems to be thinking about saying something, but doesn’t. Lucy bluffs her way closer by pretending she’s a mother with a curious child, trying to get to one of the helmeted “peelers” on duty before the palace gates. She’ll sound American when she speaks, which can’t be helped, but if she can just ask him if the queen has received any fellow Americans recently, pretend she’s with the delegation, hear what offer Rittenhouse is making the monarch of close to a third of the world, the British Empire at its height, when she’s beside herself with grief and would promise them anything if they –

If they told her, say, that they could bring Albert back –

Just as Lucy is turning cold all over with the thought that it might not be _nineteenth-century_ Rittenhouse operatives here, but _modern_ ones, actively and openly trying to change the course of history, they step around the corner by the Mews and the girl stops dead again. Then her eyes go very wide. “Daddy?” she says. _“Daddy?”_

Lucy’s head jerks up. She stares at the tall, dashing figure in the well-cut suit and tails, collar likewise turned up against the cold – and is struck down on the spot by lightning.

Flynn stares back at her. Back at them. He isn’t moving. Nor does he appear to be breathing.

“DADDY!” The girl breaks loose and runs to him, buttoned boots splashing in the puddles, neat and pretty in her borrowed clothes (they had some trouble finding a set small enough for her, but there are still a lot of things hidden in the corners of that warehouse), and throws herself around his legs. Flynn remains transfixed to the spot, as revelation crashes over Lucy in further waves of ice-cold shock. This – this _can’t be –_ the name floats up from the depths of the file. _Iris Flynn._ His daughter. The one who was murdered, along with his wife, to warn him not to say anything about what he had discovered, and when Rittenhouse officially made their monster. The scale of the history Flynn has changed recently – whether it was saving the _Titanic_ or something else – he’s done it. Twisted and tweaked it somehow, totally by accident. Whichever Rittenhouse agent was supposed to kill his daughter wasn’t there, or only his wife was targeted, or –

(Is his wife back too? _Is she?)_

(Lucy feels almost gut-wrenchingly sick, and has absolutely no idea why.)

“You.” Flynn speaks at last, putting a hand on her shoulder and pushing her back. “Y…” His hands are shaking. He looks like a ghost, like nothing Lucy has ever seen before. “I think you’re mistaken.”

“No, I’m not. Daddy, it’s me!” The girl grabs hold of his jacket and shakes him. “Daddy, it’s me, Iris!”

Flynn might be having a heart attack. He moves as if to touch her shining dark hair, clearly wants to pick her up and clutch her and never let her go, and is terrified more than anything else to do it. Whatever he came to 1861 London to do, he has completely forgotten it. He disentangles himself clumsily, turns around, lowers his head against the sleet, and just about starts to run.

After a moment, Lucy’s paralysis breaks. It is a pain in the ass to run in heavy skirts, but she says to Iris, “Wait here, don’t move,” and then she does her damndest. Flynn has a considerable head start and he is moving like a bat out of hell, but she finally corners him under the eaves of some supper-club on a side street, grabbing his arm and shoving him around. “It’s your daughter?” she manages, half in statement and half in accusation. “It’s your _daughter.”_

“No. No. It’s not. It’s a trick. It’s some kind of fold, some ripple in reality, some – I don’t know. I don’t know what it is.” Flynn’s eyes are utterly black, his face dead white. He looks like Dracula, torn from the crypt by day to crumble to ash in sunlight. Not that there is much of that, this being London in winter before the invention of electricity. “Lucy. Just…go.”

“I am not. I am _not going.”_ Lucy shakes him. “Do you know how much I would give to see my sister again? If that was Amy back there, if there was even the smallest, most remote chance that I could see her and touch her again – Garcia. Garcia, please. Don’t walk away from her. Don’t walk away!”

Flynn jerks as if he’s been shot. That is, as far as either of them know, the first time she has used his first name, and she closes her hands around his arms, their faces very close in the murk and mist, his eyes like open wounds. “Go back to her,” Lucy whispers. “Go back.”

“I can’t.” His lips barely move. “I am not her father any more. I’m not going to – Lucy, are you insane? You know who I am! _What_ I am? Do you really think it’s such a wise idea to make her _live_ with me? Jumping through time with her strapped into a car seat in the Mothership? Rittenhouse isn’t destroyed! They could still kill her again! All of us! _YOU!”_

Lucy flinches as if she’s been slapped; his voice isn’t loud, but it feels like a roar, even as her nerveless fingers clutch the lapels of his coat. She wants to physically drag him back to Iris, even as she thinks ludicrously of the song by the same name. _And I don’t want the world to see me, ‘cause I don’t think that they’d understand/When everything’s meant to be broken, I just want you to know who I am._

She knows. God. She knows who he is, and it is tearing her almost in half. Tears ooze from beneath her eyelashes, even as Flynn makes half a convulsive movement as if to fish out a handkerchief. Then his hand falls, and he tries to pull away.

Lucy Preston does not let him go.

They take a step, and then another, and stumble around the corner and into a courtyard, into one of the tents where London’s poorest people try to scrape out a miserable existence; it is essentially a punishable crime to be a pauper in this day and age, those horrible Dickensian workhouses and debtor’s prisons and orphanages aren’t just flights of fancy, unfortunately. This one is empty, its occupant out to push a costermonger’s barrow for hours, or hawk a paper about the prince’s death for a few pennies, and Lucy and Flynn fall entangled onto the pile of rags and coats inside. He grasps hold of her, kissing her like he’s drowning, raw and hotter and more desperately than he ever has, practically tearing her skirts away and getting two fingers into her, opening her, as he hitches himself up on her and then sheathes himself inside her with a thrust, deep and desperate. The cold air whirls around them, biting at any exposed skin, even as they’re striking sparks with the force of their coupling. He ruts hard against her, drives to the back of her spine, as she jerks and bends her hips up on him, arms around his neck, mouth open, keening.

Lucy almost thinks she’s left her own body by the time the dam breaks, and whatever is in her can barely be contained, and they roll over and over, riding and thrusting, in snow and ash, _excelsis_. She thinks briefly of the fact that the Victorians are supposedly very, _very_ Not Amused by sex, wonders if someone is going to report them to a very disapproving bobby with a handlebar mustache who will throw them in one of the aforesaid prisons, but doesn’t care. All that matters is him, and him inside her, and her shuddering and slick and deep and sweet, and how desperately she has come to hunger for his familiar weight and solid stretch of her, his heaviness and hardness, fit exactly for her. Maybe he’s right. Maybe it’s _meant to be._

After the dazzled, shivering afterglow fades, he pushes himself back on his knees, slides out of her. Gets up, does up his trousers. Stares down at her as if to sear her onto his eyes, his mind, his soul, his existence, for eternity. And then – if nothing else, Garcia Flynn is a man of his word. Does what he promised, and goes.

Lucy understands only too late that this is goodbye. Jumps up, shakes her skirts down, and runs out of the alley after him, heart in her throat, thighs still slick with him. “Flynn?” she screams. “Flynn!”

There is no sign of him. Only the falling snow. Somewhere in the distance, church bells begin to boom the hour, deep and dolorous.

_“FLYNN!”_

Nothing.

Lucy stands transfixed, numb and shaking. Knows she has to get back to the palace, find Iris again – and then wonders suddenly and horribly if Flynn was right, and she was just some sort of accident, a momentary glimpse into a reality where she was still alive. As if she too will have faded in the smoke of London’s countless chimneys, a ghost come to visit Scrooge in the dead of night. Telling him to mend his ways, warning him, and vanishing in morning light.

Lucy turns and starts to trudge. Wraps her arms around herself.

She has never been so cold in her entire life.

 

**VII.**

“Stop me if I’m stating the obvious,” Rufus says. “But what the _hell_ do we do now?“

Lucy really, really wishes she had an answer for that. They’re sitting in the Lifeboat, not yet daring to pull out of 1861 entirely just yet, in case this was somehow an elaborate bluff and Flynn was just trying to trick them into leaving early, but according to the onboard computers, the Mothership is no longer in the nineteenth century. Nor are they sure where it’s ended up. It’s gone blank. Off the grid. They have absolutely no idea where or _when_ Flynn is, and they may never again. If he thinks he’s done with his mission, if he destroyed the Mothership to prevent Rittenhouse from getting it – but he said he wasn’t, so he must have found some way to break the processing links between the two machines. _Needle in a haystack_ doesn’t even begin to cover the difficulty of finding him again.

“She’s his kid,” Wyatt says, looking at Iris, who is curled up on his jacket on the floor and has fallen asleep, not before crying herself out. “She’s _his_ kid, he’s somehow stumbled his damn way into actually doing what he tried, and he – he what, just freezes up? Dumps her on us? Runs? Yeah. Father of the Year.”

“You can’t tell me you might not have the same reaction if… if Jessica just walked up to you one day on one of our missions. Or I would, with Amy.” Lucy rubs her temples. The Time Team, to say the least, never foresaw becoming the three reluctant adoptive parents of Garcia Flynn’s resurrected child, but that seems to be the role they have been presently stuck with. Just another day at the office. “And either way, this isn’t her fault.”

Wyatt clenches a fist on his knee. “So of all of us who want lost loved ones back, fuckin’ _Flynn_ is the one to do it first, probably has no idea how he did it, and doesn’t even think she’s real, so he just leaves her behind for us to clean up his mess. Typical.”

“We have to find someone to leave her with,” Rufus says. “Unless we’re planning to stick her up on the dash like a bobblehead and make her our mascot. Denise – Agent Christopher, can’t she find some sort of government program for the kids of criminal masterminds who need good homes – “

“We can’t dump her on Denise! And we can’t let either the government or Rittenhouse get hold of her! They killed her once, what makes you think they won’t do it again?” Lucy shifts in her seat, as if to shield Iris from a sudden abduction attempt by armed time-traveling black ops. “Doesn’t Flynn have any other relatives, anything?”

Wyatt’s gaze flickers. Finally he says, very reluctantly, “His older half-brother. Gabriel Thompkins, the one who’s alive because Flynn saved him from the bee sting in 1969. But he has no idea he’s even related to this whack job, we’d put him in danger if we told him, and are we supposed to just turn up on his doorstep and be like, hey, here’s your niece, don’t tell her she’s back from the dead and also your brother is a total – “

Catching sight of Lucy’s face, he finishes rather restrainedly, “Problem.”

“Jesus,” Rufus says. “Emergency childcare for the offspring of your mortal enemy was _not_ one of the issues I thought was specific to time travel.”

“See if you can get the Mothership link back,” Lucy urges him. “If we have to keep her with us for now – we can probably make it work for a mission or two. But if we’re flying blind – “

“If we’re flying blind, there are no missions, are there?” Wyatt slaps his leg in frustration. “Flynn could be literally anywhere. Ancient Egypt or the Year 3000, if he figured out how to make the damn thing go forward from the present instead of just back. We should pretty much just go home and wait for Rittenhouse to arrest us! And since I’m fairly confident none of us want that – “

And at that, he stops. His brow wrinkles, as if he’s having a thought that he’d rather not, but now it’s occurred to him, he can’t dismiss it. “Lucy,” he says slowly. “This whole thing… Flynn’s supposedly following what’s written in your journal, isn’t he? He’s been one step ahead of us the whole time because of it. So…. can’t we find him through it?”

Lucy stares at him, lost. “How? I haven’t written it yet! I don’t even know if I do, or it’s some – some strange future Lucy from an alternate timeline!”

“Yeah, but,” Wyatt says, gaining steam on his crazy theory. “Think of it this way. Anywhere we go, Flynn has to be there, because we’ll have been there, so it’s written down in your journal! So it doesn’t matter that we don’t know where that is, because, well, we know it once we’ve been there, so you do, and so does Flynn! See?”

Lucy and Rufus stare at him. “Dude,” Rufus says. “I think about this stuff for an actual living, and that made _my_ head hurt.”

“He’s right, though.” Lucy’s pulse picks up. “Wyatt, you’re right! Wherever we go, he has to be there, because future me will have already been to wherever past/present me is about to go. Oh my God. So if we can – “

“Can go where?” Rufus reminds her. “We still need a destination. We can’t just launch the Lifeboat like a barrel over Niagara Falls. Think like future you, Lucy. Where did we go after 1861 London?”

It takes Lucy a moment, but – whether it’s some sort of quantum connection with herself, if it’s something, and she has to trust in it. “Baltimore,” she says. “Fort McHenry, September 13, 1814. The British attacked it during the War of 1812, it held out all night under intense bombardment, and the sight of its flag being raised in victory in the morning inspired a poet named Francis Scott Key to write ‘Defence of Fort M’Henry.’ You’d probably know it more like this.” She hums a few bars.

“Oh say can you see? Flynn’s trying to stop the national anthem from being written?” Rufus considers, then throws up his hands. “He’s crazy. Whatever.”

“How is it part of the War of 1812 if it happens in 1814?” Wyatt wants to know.

“Come _on,_ guys,” Lucy says.”Let’s _go.”  
_

This is a risky jump to make without returning to the present to juice up the Lifeboat, but none of them want to take the risk that Flynn could then jump two times ahead – technically, the same process should work to find him, but they still have to go wherever they were originally planning, and it gets progressively more complicated, and Rufus has drawn a lot of fiendishly difficult equations to demonstrate this that Lucy and Wyatt have to take his word for. So they land in a thick grove of Maryland forest, step out, and have to borrow the first clothes off a washing line that they find, as they are about fifty years ahead of the fashion curve. Iris perks up a bit at the prospect of another adventure (she’s definitely a Flynn, this one) but is still upset that her father seems to think she’s a cruel figment of his imagination. “Is Daddy here?” she asks Lucy, as they walk a rutted dirt road into Baltimore. British Naval frigates are visible in the harbor, preparing for the attack, and the city has that hushed, cramped, nervous air of a place under siege, the calm before the storm. It reminds Lucy of the Alamo, which isn’t altogether comforting.

“I hope so, honey,” Lucy says. She tries to think what Flynn might be doing – supplying the Brits with modern firepower to ensure the fort falls, depriving the Americans of both a symbolic and a crucially important strategic victory? It has to be about more than the Star-Spangled Banner, though that in itself is fairly weighty. Maybe Key was Rittenhouse, and Flynn is just going to go back to basics and shoot him in the head. She doesn’t know. She’s so tired.

When they reach Baltimore, Wyatt, who is clearly a soldier and is also wearing an old Continental Army jacket, is immediately pressed into the defense of the fort, Rufus is addressed as “boy” and ordered to fetch more supplies for the guns, and Lucy and Iris are shuffled out of the way. “It’s not safe for you and your daughter here, ma’am,” says Major George Armistead, commander of the American defenses, who Lucy has nearly accidentally addressed as such before remembering not to. “We’ve protected the harbor well, they shouldn’t pass, but – “

Lucy is about to mention that Iris isn’t her daughter, and then is about to mention that exactly due to those defenses, the British ships aren’t going to be able to get close enough to do much damage – the display that so impressed Francis Scott Key is a lot of noise and bombast, but not much substance. Kind of like America itself, especially under its new cheeto-haired fearless leader, but this is definitely not something she can say. Instead, she smiles. “Vice Admiral Cochrane, the British fleet commander – I have a contact, I might be able to get you information on his plans. Have you seen a man – tall, dark? Sounds rather like a Hessian when he talks? His name is Flynn.”

Armistead squints at her. “You know him how?”

“He’s – he’s my husband.” No other obvious lie presents itself. “This is our daughter. I’ve come in search of him.”

Armistead clearly isn’t sure, but also can’t contradict her, and Iris seems to sense the ploy and doesn’t say anything to challenge it. Finally, he says, “Hurry. Cochrane sent notice the bombardment was going to begin at six o’clock. If you’re still in the way, Mrs. Flynn, I can’t guarantee your safety.”

“Thank you,” Lucy says, takes a firmer grip on Iris’ hand, hurries out of his office. She has a quiet word with Rufus to tell him that she’s going to look, and heads out to comb the side streets and quays and muddy alleys and loaded wagons of Baltimore Harbor. The British Navy ships, a few miles out as they might be, still look fairly intimidating. Lucy reminds herself that the guns and rockets won’t be able to reach them here, but what if Flynn _does_ change it?

As promised, the bombardment begins at sundown, and it’s, to say the least, pretty spectacular. The booms and thuds and whistles arc overhead in scarlet traceries, flashing and sparking – the effect is more like fireworks, almost pretty, than an actual military threat. Lucy has not found Flynn, has had to get off the docks as some of the missiles _can_ reach them here, and has found herself back in the fort with Rufus and Wyatt, trying to find supper for Iris and somewhere away from the worst of the noise. They sit against a heavy inner wall, feeling the distant shakes and thuds, as Iris finally, timidly puts her head in Lucy’s lap. “Can you tell me a story?”

Lucy doesn’t really feel like a story right now, especially when she is convinced that there’s more she could be doing to ensure history happens correctly, but they can’t really go anywhere right now, and the kid has been through a lot. So she makes one up on the fly, stroking Iris’ hair, until she falls asleep, and a strange, painful tremor squeezes Lucy’s heart. She bends down, lifts Iris up, and stashes her in some grain sacks, then goes to find the boys.

As she feared, things aren’t quite going how they’re promised. The British ships are more powerful than they’re supposed to be, and the fort is starting to wear down under the bombardment. They’ve sunk several ships across the harbor to form a blockade, but the British have some way of clearing them – underwater mines definitely haven’t been invented yet – and while Lucy should be pleased that she’s guessed right, that Flynn is clearly indeed here, she can’t be. They’re not going to make it to the dawn’s early light, at this rate. They’re getting killed in here – figuratively, and clearly soon literally.

She, Wyatt, and Rufus do their best, but there’s only so much they can, and the British ships are getting closer and closer as they blast aside the obstacles. The barrage is full-on and relentless; Lucy’s head is reeling. This isn’t just like the _Titanic,_ where ordinary people live (as well as some powerful ones). She doesn’t know if winning Fort McHenry will give the Brits the permanent upper hand in the War of 1812, but at the very least, it means no national anthem, and it ups the odds of strangling Rittenhouse-born America in its cradle. Wipe the slate clean. Start again. _You idiot,_ she wants to scream. _I’m in here. Your daughter’s in here._ Evidently Flynn thought that taking the Mothership off the grid would be enough to hide him. He has no idea they’re here.

Fort McHenry strikes its colors just before dawn, its walls all but reduced to rubble, bodies stacked up everywhere. The Americans were only supposed to lose four people in this attack; the timeline is now compromised beyond recognition. Armistead goes forth grimly to present his surrender to his counterpart, Cochrane, who has drawn ashore in a boat with his own captains and officers. Wyatt, Rufus, and Lucy have convinced Armistead to let them come with him, as they reach the pebbled spit of beach. Iris is back in the fort with the other women and children. It’s no surety that the Lifeboat has enough juice to get home. And there is no support team back at HQ to bail their asses out, such as when they were stranded in 1754. If so, there’s a handy word for their situation. Starts with _f,_ ends with _ucked_. Might be the case anyway.

One particularly tall soldier steps off the boat after Cochrane. Wearing a British Navy uniform, and yes, he looks _very_ good in it. Black cravat, white waistcoat and breeches, dark blue jacket, polished boots. But as dark and grim and exultant and remorseless and barely held-together as his face is, when his gaze falls on Lucy in the crowd, all of it vanishes completely in shock.

For then, Garcia Flynn wears the unmistakable look of a man who realizes that, no matter the numerous candidates for the title already, he has in fact just made the worst mistake of his life.


	3. Chapter 3

**VIII.**

Lucy always thought that the world fading into dramatic slow motion was only a gimmick of the movies. That things didn’t actually stretch out, stagger, stop, and then fall flat like a star collapsing in on itself, but then, that was also before she traveled through time on a weekly basis. Also before she locked eyes with Garcia Flynn among the smoldering wreckage of Fort McHenry and original American history alike, as she can see the shock having time to good and settle in. He turns convulsively to Cochrane. “Your Excellency – ”

“Not now, sir.” Cochrane is more interested in graciously accepting Armistead’s surrender, which he provides, and motioning for a squadron of dragoons off the longboats. “Take the men up into the fort and raise His Majesty’s colors. Deal with anyone you find, but no need to be barbaric about it. They are, after all, His Majesty’s subjects.”

Just as Wyatt is opening his mouth, either to remark something smart about who won the Revolutionary War or to inform Cochrane that the first man who needs to be dealt with (preferably, in fact, barbarically) is the one standing next to him, Armistead catches sight of Lucy and Flynn staring at each other. A flicker of dark suspicion crosses his face, and he whirls on her. “Is _this_ your husband, madam?” he demands. “No bloody wonder you promised to obtain me information on Cochrane’s plans, if your own spouse was assisting him in carrying them out! Or was it that _you_ were passing information to _him,_ and that is why the fort has fallen? _Is it?”_

There’s an ominous clunk as the American soldiers, surrender or no surrender, raise their muskets and point them at Lucy. The redcoats accordingly go for their own, Wyatt throws himself in front of her, Flynn lunges forward and grabs for the semi-automatic pistol that he must be wearing beneath that nicely tailored Napoleonic-Royal-Navy officer’s jacket, and the beach is on the verge of threatening to deteriorate into complete chaos on the spot. Cochrane bellows at his men to hold their fire, and the standoff holds, if barely. “Your wife, sir?” he demands of an equally flabbergasted Flynn. “Your wife was among the American contingent this whole time, and you offered none of this intelligence to me, nor suggested a word of decency? Beastly behavior! Beastly, I say!”

“I – ” Nobody has ever seen (or likely ever will again) Garcia Flynn so completely at a loss. “I didn’t… she’s not my – ”

“Then you will not object, _sir,_ if we shoot her for treason?” Armistead is looking at Lucy with a rather unsettling hatred. She’s gotten oddly used to the fact that people in history – Robert Todd Lincoln, Ian Fleming, Harry Houdini, Josephine Baker – seem to like her. Flirt with her, even. There is none of that here. This man wants her dead. “A spy neither for my side nor yours, but some nefarious agent of – what, perhaps, the French? Or – ”

“Shoot her,” Wyatt says loudly, “and you’ll only wish you didn’t.”

“But if she’s a – ”

The American soldiers raise their muskets again. Cochrane is looking alarmed but not as if he’s going to stop it, Armistead is furious, Wyatt has his hand on his own gun and Rufus has picked up a very large boulder to brain someone like Fred Flintstone if they try to touch Lucy, but there’s still no way that’s enough of them to –

“Stop!” Flynn says, almost a roar. Has to modulate himself, which he does with a terrible effort. “Stop,” he repeats, with a twisted smile. “What I meant was, I didn’t know that she was in there. Not that she wasn’t my wife. She is. She must have… followed me. I’m not sure how.”

“Your wife.” Cochrane chews that over. “Well, it’s damned more than an apology you owe her, sir. Mrs. Flynn, my profuse regrets for the distress of your situation and the unworthiness of your husband’s actions. If you wish to retire with me to my flagship, we will make you the more comfortably lodged while this messy business is carried out.”

Lucy doesn’t budge. “No thank you, Your Excellency,” she says icily. “I prefer to remain with my countrymen.”

Cochrane raises an eyebrow at Flynn. “Inevitable result of marrying a colonial, sir? Choosing her native soil over you – would that we were all blessed with such faithful spouses. Shall I leave you to discipline your wife while we handle the work of the fort? Kill all the combatants, spare only the unarmed and children. We’ve burned Washington and forced President Madison to flee, if we move quickly, we can consolidate this victory and – ”

Wyatt flashes a desperate look at Lucy, asking if he can just shoot Cochrane now and prevent this from getting any worse than it is, but she shakes her head. “Yo – our daughter!” she yells at Flynn instead. “Our daughter is in the fort! That’s what I was doing all night, looking after her, trying to stop her from being frightened, telling her it would be all right, and now she’s what – going to be taken as a prisoner? All she wants, all she’s wanted, is to see you again, just like I _know_ you have, and this is what you do instead? _This?”_

Cochrane harrumphs, gesturing to the redcoats. “Well, chaps. Let’s leave the man to his much-deserved arse-skelping in peace. If we find your daughter, Mrs. Flynn, she will be brought to you safely and unmolested, you have my word. Gents, forward.”

The dragoons and the admiral march off with the defeated American garrison to assume command of Fort McHenry, Wyatt and Rufus stay firmly where they are, and all three of the Time Team stare absolute daggers through Flynn. “You know, man,” Rufus says coolly. “I’ve told you this before, but you really suck.”

Flynn flinches. Raises a hand as if to run it through his tousled hair, then drops it. “How did… I severed the connection, you weren’t supposed to be able to –”

“Surprise, dickhead.” Wyatt glares at him. “Lucy’s smarter than you. She’s always been smarter than you.”

Flynn looks as if all things considered, he can’t really deny that, and would probably agree.

“You helped.” Lucy slips her arm through Wyatt’s on one side and Rufus’s on the other, standing shielded between them, making it clear where her allegiances lie. “Both of you helped. You know why? Because we’re a team. That’s what teams do.”

“Lucy.” Flynn takes a step. “Lucy, listen to me, I didn’t – ”

“I don’t care!” At last, it bursts out of her, everything she’s been dying to say, her confusion and frustration and desperation and utter bewilderment that she, Lucy Preston, who finished a double PhD at Stanford at age twenty-seven and has always been so smart, so logical, so in control of herself, has been so utterly undone by this man, and the unfathomable, unforgivable effect he has on her. “I don’t care if you thought we could follow you or not! You still went! You still didn’t stop! You ran away from your daughter, you ran away from me – I know you were scared, I know you didn’t think you could, but you are so blinded that you cannot see what is directly in _front_ of you! Now you’ve torched the timeline beyond all recognition, who _knows_ what you’ve done to the future, and whether any of it even mattered to Rittenhouse at all, or if you just like destroying things too much to stop! I can’t believe I thought there was even a question as to whether or not I might decide to come with you! You’re a selfish, vengeful, dangerous, uncontrolled car bomb of a man, and you bite any hand that comes near you! I’ve done – I don’t even _know_ what I’ve done! Or what you have! I don’t know what apology you were planning on offering, or if you even were, but it is not accepted. It is _not_ accepted.”

Flynn looks absolutely stricken. A card and flowers doesn’t exactly cut it for this level of fuck-up, and he definitely knows it. The silence remains icy and endless, until there’s the sound of tramping boots behind them, and they turn to see a redcoat leading Iris by the hand. “This your daughter, Mrs. Flynn?”

“Yes,” Lucy says, turning to take custody of Iris, who whimpers, wraps her arms around Lucy’s waist, and buries her face in her stomach. “Thank you.”

Flynn has turned into even more of a statue on this second sight of his daughter, the proof that she’s real, she’s somehow made it back, and that she’s been tagging along with the Time Team on their mad joyrides through history after him and his bull-in-a-china-shop routine. A muscle works in his jaw. After the redcoat has departed, he coughs painfully, clears his throat, and says at last, to the distant horizon over Lucy’s left shoulder, “Iris.”

She turns around slowly, but unlike in London, she doesn’t run to him and hug him. She remains where she is, holding onto Lucy. It’s clear she is too terrified of another rejection – and as she looks at him, really looks at him, this strange man in his Navy uniform, dark and grim and battle-worn, it’s clear that she isn’t seeing her father anymore. She doesn’t know who he is. He scares her. He damn well should.

“Iris,” Flynn says again, painfully, half in a hoarse whisper. “Iris, it’s me.”

At last, Iris lets go of Lucy, takes an uncertain step, then stops. Loses her nerve, turns around, and runs back to Wyatt, who picks her up while glaring at Flynn, as if to say that yes, he hates him, but he isn’t going to take it out on his kid. With Rufus providing a parting shot of stink-eye, the Time Team starts to walk, leaving Flynn behind on the beach, waves still crashing just a few feet from his boots. Lucy doesn’t look back. She can’t. She can’t.

She can’t.

* * *

They have no idea what to do. Should they stick around and try to salvage as much of the aftermath as they can, see if there’s any way to get history back on track, jump back to the present (assuming the Lifeboat can make it) to see how badly it’s gone FUBAR, or – what? Wyatt is all for handing Flynn over to Cochrane and court-martialing him, or _something,_ but Rufus and Lucy aren’t sure what that’s going to accomplish. “Maybe we can steal the Mothership,” Rufus says. “Has to be around here somewhere. It definitely has enough charge to get us back.”

“And what about Flynn? We just leave him here?” Lucy speaks without opening her eyes. She feels as if her head weighs a thousand tons. The rest of her too. She should be happy, feel liberated, avenged. Instead she just feels flattened.

“He’s tried to strand, imprison, or shoot us in the past multiple times,” Wyatt points out coolly. “We can’t kill him, as you said, but why can’t we do exactly that? Leave him? He can go have a nice life as an army commander in the new British States of America or whatever is going to happen to history as a result of his fucking around. And he’s a smart guy, he’ll probably figure out how to get the Lifeboat back into action eventually, make it home. He won’t be arrested or chased by Rittenhouse here. It’s more than he deserves.”

Lucy opens her mouth, then shuts it. Wyatt is right, she herself has just told Flynn in no uncertain terms where to stick it, and the solution is neat and fitting. There is a certain appeal to leaving him stuck here permanently to clean up the mess that he himself made, and this is undoubtedly what she should _want_ to do. It makes sense, that way. All of this godforsaken bitch of an unsatisfactory situation makes sense that way.

“Let’s see if the Lifeboat is out of gas,” she says at last. “Then we can decide if we need to.”

This is agreed, they tramp out of Baltimore to the woods where they left it, and quickly discover that yes, yes it is out of gas. Maybe if they were chronologically closer to 2017, they might be able to risk it, but from 1814 is too far, and you obviously cannot get out and push a time machine that has run dry. Wyatt wants to know what the odds are of making it home anyway if they shut down all non-essential functions and reroute everything into the engine, and Rufus says they’re dim. You really don’t want to know what happens to you if you don’t stick your landing, and you end up exiled from the time stream forever. It is, so much as he can tell, a fate quite honestly worse than death.

“What if we just sent a few of us back?” Wyatt says quietly. “You, Rufus, you’re the pilot, you have to go. Lucy, you take Iris, and… I mean, I probably use the most resources anyway. If I stay, I can deal with whatever Flynn’s got going on, stop the bleeding as much as I can, and you can come back for me in a few months, when you won’t have already been here and don’t have to worry about crossing your timeline. I swear,” he adds, at Lucy’s look. “I wouldn’t kill him. Just make sure he doesn’t jump again, and see if I can fix things.”

“No,” Lucy and Rufus say in unison. “No, we’re not leaving you behind.”

“This is unprecedented,” Wyatt says. “We can’t just check out of this like usual. I’m the sergeant, I take control of handling it and protecting my team. That’s you two. Someone needs to know what the damage is in the present, and someone needs to mitigate the damage in the past. Rufus. Could you make the jump with just you two and Iris?”

“Maybe, but Wyatt – ”

“Then do it,” Wyatt says stubbornly. “You’ll come back for me, I know you will. I trust you.”

Lucy and Rufus exchange a long look. They both hate this intensely, but Wyatt, as usual, has a point. Finally, it’s decided to risk it, because the situation is simply too unprecedented. Lucy hugs Wyatt for about five minutes, refusing to let him go, promising they’ll make it back, as Rufus finally has to tap her on the shoulder and tell her they can’t waste what energy the Lifeboat does have. They get in with Iris, shut the door, strap in, and Rufus boots up the controls, preparing for the jump. Does his calculations, prepares for launch. As usual.

The machine is spinning faster and faster, also as usual, and yet, Lucy oddly can’t take it. It’s worse than the usual claustrophobia, it’s something deeper, primal existential terror, the knowledge that she can’t return to the present and survive. She starts to scream. “RUFUS! RUFUS, NO! RUFUS, _DON’T!”_

He aborts the launch at the last instant, slamming down the controls, and the Lifeboat’s waning energy gurgles and dies. That is it. They’re dead in the water. No chance of a second attempt.

“Lucy?” Rufus unbuckles and runs to her. “Lucy! What is it?”

“I…” Lucy bends over, nauseous, spitting, stomach churning, still caught in the throes of that unspeakable pain. Looks up at him in terror. It doesn’t make sense, and yet she knows it’s true. “Rufus,” she whispers. “Rufus, I don’t exist in the present any more. I’ve been erased.”

* * *

“Changed my mind,” Wyatt says grimly, breaking off a twig and throwing it into the fire. “Let’s kill Flynn after all.”

Lucy is still feeling too sick to do more than give him a look, as they sit against the logs with stomachs rumbling, all of them hungry (except for her, because her guts are still revolting) and realizing they’re either stuck here for good, or they have to find some way to hijack the Mothership. It’s already risky enough that they’ve been jumping with four people instead of three, but Iris is a child, and small enough that she doesn’t register; the calibrations are fixed for three adults, not four, but she flies under the radar, literally. Still. There is obviously no way that Lucy, Wyatt, Rufus, _and_ Flynn can all go home in the Mothership, Iris or otherwise. Someone is going to be the odd man out, unless they can jump the Lifeboat like a dead car battery. Talk about a short straw you don’t want to pull.

“So,” Rufus says. “We have to go back to the fort and get Flynn to help us, after his dumb ass already is the reason Lucy was eradicated from the present? Isn’t that like someone running you over with your car, then you asking if they would mind taking you to the hospital?”

“Yeah.” Wyatt’s jaw clenches. “Pretty much. But we don’t really have a choice, do we?”

Lucy doesn’t answer. She stares up at the stars and tries to shut out her head. Stuck here. Stuck. Something about the fall of Fort McHenry has twisted the fabric of time just so. As long as she stays in this timeline, she exists. If she tries to leave again, to any time, anywhere –

It’s Rufus, Wyatt, and Flynn who have to go home in the Mothership.

She is the odd one out.

She’s the one never going back.

She rolls over and tries to sleep. It doesn’t work.

It doesn’t stop.

They arrive at Fort McHenry the next morning, cadge an audience by trading on “Mrs. Flynn’s” desire to converse with her ungallant spouse, and while Wyatt and Rufus stand guard, glaring at the passing redcoats, Cochrane takes Lucy by the arm and escorts her down the hall, continuing to apologize for her discomfort. It’s clear that if anyone, he’s the historical figure who might have a bit of a thing for her, and she has to take it for what it’s worth. He shows her into the office he’s taken over, promises he’ll fetch her husband, and departs.

Lucy stands with fists clenched, trying not to let them tremble, listening to the hammering of the British soldiers rebuilding and garrisoning the place, until the door opens and Flynn steps inside, shutting it behind him. He looks as if he’s spent the night in hell. She’s still mad at him, she’s still furious, but his desolation is so absolute and evident that she bites her tongue on everything else she was planning to shout at him. They stare at each other, stiffly and agonizingly, for a very long moment. Then Lucy blurts out, “You erased me.”

He stares at her. This seems to completely rattle the foundations of the world. “What?”

“You erased me.” She jerks her chin back. “Rufus and I tried to leave in the Lifeboat. I can’t go back. I don’t exist in 2017 anymore. Something that happened here, with what you did. I’m trapped here. I can’t leave this timeline, or I just…” She waves a hand. Her voice shakes. “I’m not there anymore. I don’t know what happens.”

Flynn actually staggers a bit. Sits down on the edge of the desk. Has nothing to say to that. Doesn’t move, doesn’t even seem to stir the air. His voice, when it comes, is barely a breath, a deep gravelly rasp. “Lucy. . .”

“I said a lot of things yesterday. I know.” She stares at the ground, then forces herself to look at him. “I’m still angry at you. But I. . . listen to me. I need you to go with Wyatt and Rufus to the present. I need you to take them in the Mothership, and find out what changed as a result, why I wasn’t born. And then put it right. I can’t go back myself. I need you to undo whatever you did. I need you to save me. I don’t have any other choice.”

He closes his eyes hard. The one thing he has been trying to do all this time, to ever less result. And now he’s gotten Iris back, somehow – and in return, erased Lucy. Recaptured the past, but destroyed the present. He sits there with his shoulders crunched under the weight of the world, the realization of how no matter what he does, the scales will always be unbalanced. It’s a terrible thing to do to a man, and despite everything, Lucy can’t bear to watch him go through it alone. Somehow, not meaning to, she comes closer. Reaches out, and puts a hand on his knee.

That small thing, that tiny connection, that light touch, after everything far less innocent they’ve already done, utterly snaps both of them. The next instant his hands are in her hair, he’s dragging her mouth down to his, and she’s sliding onto the table between his knees, crouched between them, as they kiss and bite and devour each other, open-mouthed and wet and gasping, her arms wrapped around him as far as they can go. He pulls off her cloak and buries his face between her breasts, kissing up her throat, branding her, sucking and licking. Swings her around, scattering papers, and slides a hand up her skirt, even as she’s hauling him closer, fumbling at him, doesn’t care about anything else but this. _How do I love thee,_ she thinks, somewhere, somehow, faintly. _Like a sickness and its cure together._

Flynn shucks the white Navy breeches with a rip, climbing between her legs as Lucy can’t wait, gets her hands inside to grasp him, caress him, guiding him into her, fingers slick on herself. Their breath catches in stuttering moans as he slides his arms under her shoulders, lifting her up into him, thrusting desperately. He can’t get deep enough inside her to satisfy either of them. Rips her bodice, actually rips it – that actually happens outside of romance novels, apparently. Grips both of her hands, their fingers twining together, and pushes her arms over her head, stretching her, bending her up to every bit of his mouth, her legs sprawling open for him, the slick and bunch and heave of their bodies, the heavy thump of the table beneath them. She gasps and whines and curses. Bites at his ear, jerks and ruts and rubs against him. Still not enough. “Harder,” she manages. _“Harder.”_

If he went any harder, they’d about strike flames, and yet he does. They roll over, sending ink and papers flying, and he ends up beneath her, still inside her, as Lucy straddles him, knees sliding to either side of his hips, fingering herself as he continues to thrust, hot raw mouth and half-grown stubble burning the tender skin of her breasts. His hands close like vises on her hips. _Sickness and cure._ Mercy and madness. Poison and wine. _Beauty and the beast._

Her climax almost tears her in half, as she heaves and wrenches and loses her mind, as he rolls her over, pushes her flat, and plunges inside her to the core, pulsing and shuddering and spilling. She wraps her arms around his neck, and they lie there amongst the devastation of the desk, papers floating gently, sunlight embroidering a golden track among the dust motes. His body is still shivering, completely hers, one flesh, one breath, one life. After the hard breathing and the crashing and gasping and thumping, the silence is towering and eternal.

At last, Flynn jerks. Once and then again. His head remains buried in Lucy’s shoulder. She’d almost think, for half a moment, that he’s crying. Yet when he lifts it, when he looks at her and she feels it to the back of her, his eyes are utterly clear.

“Lucy,” he whispers, as he shifts, slides out of her, and stands up. As her arms stay around his neck, as their foreheads touch, as she is raw and ragged and bare to the bone, as there is no way she can imagine having to let go of him now. “I swear. I’m going to save you.”


	4. Chapter 4

**IX.**

The sun is low and bloody in the west by the time Lucy, Wyatt, Rufus, and Iris duck into the secluded, wooded grove where Flynn has told them to meet him, where the Mothership is parked. They stand in tense silence until twigs crackle, Wyatt puts his hand to his gun by reflex, and Flynn and Emma Whitmore emerge from the trees, at which Wyatt does not necessarily remove it. “Right,” he says grimly. “So I guess we’re doing this.”

Lucy gives the lot of them a _behave, children_ look; she really hopes Rufus is up to the task of wrangling Flynn and Wyatt back in 2017. She is feeling sick again in a way that doesn’t even have to do with the failed time jump, a roil of nerves and anxiety and the overwhelming sense that she’s not ready, she’s not ready. She smooths down her skirt several times, which it doesn’t need, as Flynn, Wyatt, and Rufus examine the Mothership and make sure that it’s good to go. Hopefully they won’t start the brawl until after they land. Lucy herself will be staying here with Iris and with Emma, who has agreed to see if she can get the Lifeboat working again. She also has experience living in the past and around this time, seeing as she met Napoleon a few years ago, and after roughing it in a cabin in 1882, she will be useful in teaching the nuts and bolts of nineteenth-century living. Hopefully not for too long, but who knows. Lucy supposes that she is being wildly optimistic to think that the boys will get to the present, make a few tweaks, and she’ll be sailing home again, free as a bird. It has never worked that way to date.

Still, though, she bites her tongue. They know the odds, they don’t need her to tell them. She hugs Rufus and Wyatt hard, then turns to Flynn. They eye each other awkwardly. An emotional hug is not really their style, no way is she going to kiss him in front of everyone (especially when she’s still more than a little pissed at him) and yet, she can’t exactly let him go without a word. Finally, she coughs and holds out her hand.

One of his dimples twitches, in amusement or exasperation, but he shakes it. Then, swiftly – and probably just to annoy Wyatt, who’s watching him like a hawk – he bends, presses a fleeting kiss to it, and lets go. Looks for a long moment at both Lucy and Iris, in case he doesn’t make it back. Follows Wyatt and Rufus up into the Mothership, and the door cycles shut with a hydraulic hiss. The lights glow blue, the revolutions gun up, the engine whines. A moment later, it blasts out of existence with a force that shakes the trees, and the women stand there in the ringing quiet. Then Emma turns to Lucy and remarks lightly, “So how long have you been sleeping with him?”

Lucy chokes. “What?”

“Come on. It _is_ pretty obvious. I’ve never known Flynn to do anything for anyone, much less leave the mission for it. You must be special.”

This unaccountably rankles Lucy, even if it’s just her old, irrational jealousy about the fact that Flynn and Emma have obviously been spending time together, seeing as Flynn already took the opportunity to barb her about it once. “Well, maybe you don’t actually know him that well.”

Emma shrugs. “Or maybe you don’t. Well, I’m guessing we can find lodgings in town – especially if you’re the wife of a Navy officer. You’ve figured out something to tell Cochrane when he asks where Flynn’s gone, haven’t you?”

“Working on it.” Lucy takes Iris’ hand, eager to get out of the darkening woods. It’s still definitely wilderness here after the sun goes down, especially feeling very alone. “So what’s your cover story, then?”

“I’m your sister, aren’t I?”

This rankles Lucy again, once more for no good reason, even as this is clearly the logical explanation. _Amy is my sister,_ she wants to say. But Amy doesn’t exist, and neither does she, and there isn’t time for this. She nods, and they start to walk.

By the time they’ve found a room in a Baltimore boarding house, a drafty attic with a bed, a nightstand, a washing basin, and a trunk, the noise of the tavern filtering through the floorboards, Lucy is absorbed in getting dinner for Iris, telling her a story, and tucking her under the quilts. She’s not necessarily a naturally maternal person, but it is taking care of someone who needs it, and that’s always been what she wants to do, what she tries to do. As they sit there on the spindly chairs in the low-burning lamplight – not much else to do, no Netflix or Facebook, not even embroidery or a book – Emma says, “You’re good with her. Kids of your own?”

“What? No, no.”

“Not going to accidentally end up with one, are you? Nineteenth-century childbirth might not be the Dark Ages, but it’s not exactly a picnic.”

“I know.” Lucy gives her an odd look. “And I’m – I get Depo-Provera shots, it is not going to be an issue, trust me. Why this sudden interest in my sex life?”

“I suppose I’m curious. You’re hired to stop this guy from destroying history. You know he’s no good. He’s your enemy, and the enemy of your friends. Now he’s done this to you. Where exactly in all of that did you decide to – whatever you _did_ decide?”

This is, to say the least, a personal and prying line of questioning, especially since Lucy doesn’t have any readily available answers. “Scouting out the competition?”

Emma smiles faintly. “Relax. Flynn isn’t my type.”

“You’re working with him, though. Spent a lot of time together?”

“He wants to destroy Rittenhouse. I’m in.”

Lucy glances at her sidelong, oddly comforted by her assurances that there’s nothing going on, even as she knows that this is decidedly the least of their problems. They don’t talk much after that, but the silence is slightly more cordial, and they manage to get some sleep, rather unavoidably familiar in the narrow bed with Iris squashed between them. Then the next morning, they head out bright and early to the grove where the dead Lifeboat is parked, so Emma can get started on tinkering with it.

Lucy is obviously not the mechanical engineer on the team, but she’s spent enough time in the damn thing to be more or less familiar with its bells and whistles. She offers to help, but Emma says it’s better if she doesn’t. Gets dug into the consoles, studies the schematics, starts trying codes and overriddes, as Lucy, who doesn’t like feeling useless, tries to distract herself by playing tag with Iris in the meadow. At one point, she thinks she hears Emma transmitting something, so she frowns, gets up, and goes over. “Hey, did you get it to work?”

Emma starts. “I’m trying the emergency frequencies. There are safeguards built in, backup plans. The Lifeboat itself wasn’t the only precaution that Connor Mason took when he was designing this thing. There are people who I might be able to patch in.”

“Yes, but seeing as Mason Industries is under the control of Rittenhouse now, I’m not entirely sure that’s a – ”

The other woman looks impatient. “There’s no way Rittenhouse knows about all of Mason’s back doors, trust me. If I can send up the emergency flare, there are systems in place to get someone to us. Make contact.”

That rubs Lucy the wrong way, for some reason. “What – there’s not a _third_ time machine, is there?”

“Not as far as I know.” Emma squints at the console board, tongue between her teeth. “But I’m not the only one who did trial runs. There are more of us out there.”

“What, planted through history? Is that part of the job perk package that Mason Industries offered? Do terribly dangerous test drives of a time machine, and you get to visit anywhere, any _when_ you want?” Lucy isn’t exactly reassured. “I got the impression that it was an accident you were out there in the woods, hiding by yourself. So afraid of Rittenhouse that you couldn’t even risk coming home. So you were what, hunting bears and setting up ham radios with your friends? One of you hanging out with Napoleon, another with Ivan the Terrible?”

“Calm down, Lucy, it’s something that I’m trying to use to save our necks.” Emma goes back to typing. “Neither of us think _Flynn’s_ going to come through, do we?”

Lucy opens her mouth, can’t think of what to say, and shuts it. Then they’re interrupted by Iris, sticking her head in. “Lucy, can we go back yet?”

“Working on it.” Lucy seems to be working on a lot of things these days. Iris has gamely held up to the adventure thus far, but it’s still 1814, and Lucy herself is starting to think that it won’t be particularly fun to live without modern comforts for long; it’s unfair to ask an eight-year-old to do it, especially one whose return to life is shrouded in mystery and might be changing again if things take another swing. “Miss Whitmore is trying to get that fixed for us.”

“Miss Whitmore? No thanks. Makes me sound like a kindergarten teacher. Emma is fine.”

“Okay, then. Emma.”

“Lucy,” Iris says. “I’m hungry.”

“Yeah,” Lucy says, distracted. “We’ll go back into town in a little bit, Iris, okay?”

“Lucy, I’m _hungry.”_

“I said, in a little bit.”

“BUT I’M HUNGRY NOW!”

“Iris! _I said in a little bit!”_

There is a slightly excruciating silence as they stare at each other, Emma raises one gingery eyebrow, and Iris’ lip begins to wobble. Until now, Lucy has been her cool older sister/mother figure/partner in fun adventure, but the disciplinarian is less enjoyable. Lucy has a moment to feel terrible, and blows out a breath. She doesn’t want to walk all the way into town and back, but summons up a smile. “I’m sorry. Let’s go find something to eat. Emma, is that okay?”

“Yeah. I’ll get a lot more done without you breathing down my neck, anyway.”

Lucy pauses, then nods. Takes Iris to walk her back into Baltimore. As they’re trudging, the girl says, “I want Mommy.”

“I’m sure you do.” Lucy can’t help but wonder, suddenly, if Flynn will meet an also-alive Lorena, back in the present. If even the idea of Flynn and Emma twists her guts in knots, this feels like King Kong has her around the middle, and that’s the most horrible and selfish of all. She knows how long Flynn has been fighting for the chance to see his family again, and she is the last person to want to deprive him of that reunion.  And yet… and yet…

She determinedly and spiritedly ignores this line of thought, as they get back into town, are able to get food thanks to her shamelessly trading on her identity as “Mrs. Flynn,” wife to Cochrane’s aide, and feels Iris’ eyes on her from behind. Once they’re eating, she says abruptly, “Did you marry my daddy?”

“No. We’re…” There is absolutely no way to explain to an eight-year-old what they are. “We know each other, that’s all. We work together. He’s gone with my friends to fix a problem he caused.”

Iris considers her with that guarded stare so very like her father’s. “Good,” she says emphatically. “Because Mommy is married to Daddy. _Mommy.”_

Lucy fights back a prickle of irritation. She would have to be the world’s worst person to argue with a child about this, a child who naturally longs to have her parents back, her world repaired. Besides, as she surely isn’t about to actually pop the question to Flynn any time soon (or obviously, vice versa) it’s a moot point anyway. Instead, she smiles. “Eat up, okay?”

Once they’re finished, they walk the few miles back to the Lifeboat; Iris gets tired halfway through, as it’s a lot of tramping for little legs, and Lucy gives her a piggyback. When they arrive, Emma is looking grease-spattered but exultant. “Well, you can thank me now. Think I hacked it. Someone’s coming to meet us in a few hours.”

“Really?”

“Yeah. One of Mason’s emergency timestream contacts. They’ll take us to a safe house, they will probably have stuff to fix the Lifeboat properly. Of course, that doesn’t help us until we know you can go back safely, but believe me. These guys know their shit.”

Lucy gives her a look to remind her that there is a child listening, but she can’t say anything to demur. There is a faint cold prickle on the back of her neck, but she ignores it. They wait a few hours until, as dusk is falling, they hear hoofbeats in the glade. A few moments later, a half-dozen men on horseback ride out, American soldiers from the look of them, but who don’t seem all that fussed to see a giant mechanical eyeball sitting in the clearing. One of them calls, “Whitmore?”

“That’s me.” Emma steps down and strides over to clasp their hands. “They’re here, just like I said.”

“And you are?” Lucy stands up, instinctively reaching for Iris. “Emma’s… friends?”

“That’s right. You’re safe.” The rider doffs his hat, then holds out his hand. “Lucy Preston? Lucy Preston-Cahill? It’s an honor. It’s such an honor to meet you.”

* * *

Wyatt Logan does not like this plan.

Wyatt Logan was never going to like this plan, and in fact it’s difficult to think of any plan that Wyatt Logan would like less, but as-per-fucking-usual, Flynn has dicked them over (Wyatt does not want to think about any other kind of dicking he has done recently) and here they are, landing the Mothership in whatever version of 2017 this is, this place where Lucy doesn’t exist, and they get the oh-so-fun task of figuring out why. They clamber out into whatever dingy East Bay garage Rufus has parked them in, brushing off and looking around. Wyatt swallows extra hard, because absolutely on no account is he going to be seasick in front of you-know-who, and does his best to sound bracing. “Well. Come on.”

Given that they are two fugitives from justice (or rather, evil organization, but whatever) and one international terrorist, the last thing they want to do is stroll down the street together with a giant ARREST US sign flashing overhead, but Wyatt is not about to let Flynn out of his sight, and he’s not going to suggest that Rufus wander off alone either. When they cautiously venture out, however, nobody seems to be glancing twice at them. They can, you know, stroll around in public, normally. Wyatt even goes so far as to let them be caught on a security camera or two, which should do the trick if Rittenhouse has eyes on the city system (if so, he and Flynn will have to break some heads – the guy is the worst human being alive, but he _can_ fight). Still nothing. They appear, incredulously, to be in the clear.

Wyatt and Flynn exchange a baffled look, rivalry momentarily forgotten in their confusion. Wyatt pushes away the thought that somehow Flynn actually _did_ do something right, completely ass-backwardly, and managed to eradicate Rittenhouse, even while taking Lucy along with it. Then they’re interrupted by Rufus, who’s staring at a newsstand. “Um… guys?”

They turn around, look at what has him so interested, and that, with no preliminary whatsoever, is how they discover that something the CSA – and yes, that does stand for Confederate States of America – has done is causing renewed outrage and the breakoff of diplomatic ties between Washington and Richmond. Rufus whips out his phone and frantically begins to Wikipedia, and they go on to learn that as a result of Fort McHenry falling to the British in 1814, they were able to establish a foothold, conquer more of New England, and hold it for the next few decades, with sporadic warfare on and off, until “Old Hickory,” Andrew Jackson, whipped them out. This, of course, left the North badly divided and unable to stand together in the upcoming Civil War, which the South then won in fairly short and decisive order. The slave states accordingly seceded, the CSA was founded, and America has been a house divided ever since, with persistent and ongoing conflict between the two. Yes, Trump is the current president of the CSA. The president of the USA is Josiah Bartlet. No, really.

“What – so he’s not a _West Wing_ character, he’s –?” This, after everything, is the one thing Wyatt is not prepared to take, and he sags onto a park bench, before he rounds on Flynn. “Look what you did! _Look what you did!_ This – history isn’t even _recognizable!”_

“I hate to take his side in this,” Rufus says unexpectedly. “But we’re also not under arrest and about to be waterboarded or whatever. Nobody’s looking for us. We’re free.”

Wyatt gives him a wounded look, but this has also struck him. “So… no Rittenhouse?”

“Or at least not as powerful. Maybe a couple of closeted wackos plotting to regain the glory days, but no vast tinfoil-hat club of creepy old white dudes who think they get to play chess with the rest of the world.” Rufus looks troubled. “But the fact that something actually named the Confederate States of America exists… I’m not sure that’s the greatest tradeoff.”

“And no Lucy.” Wyatt blows out a breath. “Her dad is – was? – Rittenhouse, is it that he doesn’t exist, or that he just didn’t join the organization in the first place?”

“Well,” Flynn says shortly. “If you’re done wallowing, maybe we can find out.”

“Yeah, that reminds me. We better find out for sure if we’re in the clear.” With that, Wyatt grabs Flynn by the collar, warns him with a look that he will do much worse if he struggles, and marches him across the street into the police station, flashes badges, and does the patter; he’s been around law enforcement, he knows how it works. “Hey, I’m a parole officer, I got one of my felons on bail here. Need to see what’s on his record.”

Flynn gives him an absolutely evil look, but somehow manages to restrain himself.  But when “Garcia Flynn” in a database doesn’t conjure up an extensive criminal record of terrible decisions, or for that matter any rap sheet at all, the officer gives them a funny look and asks where they were from, again, and Wyatt has to make excuses to get them out of there in a hurry. “Wow,” he says, out back in the alley. “That’s definitely the most unbelievable thing about this new reality. No way you’re actually innocent.”

“Are you just feeling jealous, cowboy?” Flynn flashes a slit-eyed smile. “Knowing which one of us Lucy’s sleeping with these days?”

Wyatt’s hand springs into a fist, Flynn gives him a _come-at-me-bro_ look, and they are about to face off in the alley (and, for that matter, probably actually get arrested) when Rufus jumps in the middle. “Yeah. Later. _Lucy,_ or am I the only one here that cares about her as a person, and not some kind of sick little piece in your boring brinksmanship contest?”

Suitably chastened, Wyatt and Flynn back off, glare at each other once more for good measure, and slope after Rufus. He is clearly making a beeline straight to Jiya’s apartment, as he wants to see her without the danger that Rittenhouse will swoop in and hang her by her thumbs, and because she’ll be the best lead they have, if she remembers Lucy, on getting the investigation started. But when they knock, Jiya opens the door, and stares at them, it’s with no hint of recognition. “Um? Sorry? Can I help you?”

“Jiya?” Rufus has been beaming in anticipation, but at that, it dims. “Jiya? It’s me!”

“It’s… who?”

“We’re coworkers. At Mason Industries. And I’m your…” Rufus coughs. Shyly he says, “I’m your boyfriend, remember?”

“Um. No. I think I would know that.” Jiya evaluates them critically. “What are these? Your friends?”

“No, they’re not my friends,” Rufus says. “At least when they’re being dicks. But, um, that’s beside the point. You have to remember me, don’t you? Don’t you?”

“Look, whatever your game is, not funny. Beat it, or I’m calling the cops.” With that, Jiya slams the door in his face.

Rufus jerks back, looking stunned, and Wyatt puts a hand on his shoulder. “Hey. Buddy. I’m sorry, okay? We’ll fix that too.”

“We better!” Rufus wheels on Flynn. _“My girlfriend does not remember me!”_

Flynn raises one shoulder in an utterly blasé shrug. “Maybe you aren’t that memorable.”

Wyatt gives Rufus a _I-was-gonna-handle-him-earlier_ look.

Rufus gives Wyatt a _Yeah-I-noticed_ look.

Both of them breathe deeply in through their noses and out through their mouths. They don’t want to try walking into Mason Industries in case Rufus doesn’t work there anymore, or someone still remembers that they’re supposed to pop them in the slammer. They end up, in the most unassuming of places, a public library, while Rufus grouses about the shitty internet connection and does some ninja Googling while Flynn and Wyatt eye each other through the shelves. Finally, he discovers that yes, Benjamin Cahill exists. High-powered corporate lawyer in Orange County. Looks as smug and evil as ever.

“Okay, her dad is here, but so where’s her mom?” Rufus has tried several combinations of “carol preston,” “carol preston professor,” “carol preston stanford,” “carol preston book,” and can’t seem to get any hits. “How is her _mom_ gone? If Rittenhouse isn’t around, it should be her dad.”

“Genius here probably got her mom’s side of the family killed in this whole Civil War-that-never-ended thing,” Wyatt says, jerking a thumb at Flynn. “Like living a nonstop Marvel movie, but way less entertaining.”

“Oh?” Flynn says in a growl. “It’s _my_ fault that they died?”

“Considering you were the one to screw around with history, yes!”

They’re raising their voices, earning them evil looks from a pair of passing librarians, and have to hastily pitch them down. “So,” Rufus says, quietly. “Anyone know who Lucy’s maternal grandparents were? Are we talking them not meeting, or that the Prestons actually haven’t even existed for several generations? Because it’s one thing if we have to get one set of people to meet, bang, and produce Lucy, but if it’s the family tree dying out earlier… we’d theoretically have to ensure that her sixteen great-great-grandparents, eight great-grandparents, four grandparents, and two parents all met and fell in love as they were supposed to. At, like, the bare minimum. And it goes without saying, we can’t do that.”

Wyatt closes his eyes. “Great,” he says. _“Great.”_

“Never thought the fate of the world might rest on whether I had an Ancestry.com subscription,” Rufus mutters, typing away. He manages to get onto the site, but is thwarted by the fact that it’s incredibly difficult to search for Carol Preston’s pedigree and genealogy when Carol Preston does not exist. Frustrated, he bangs the keyboard, they nearly get evicted again by the very unimpressed librarians, and Rufus surreptitiously flips them the bird under the desk, takes a deep breath, and goes back to Google. Apparently as a why-the-hell-not, he types in “lucy preston.”

There’s a long pause – slow even by the standards of crappy public computers – as the request processes through. Results pop up for other people named Lucy Preston, but not their Lucy, as Flynn and Wyatt crane over both his shoulders. Then, most unexpectedly, a message alert appears on the screen. It fizzes, flickers in and out, and then goes Blue Screen of Death.

“What the – ” Rufus is about at the end of his rope, especially as accidentally getting a random-ass virus from this shitty piece of shit with its shitty internet and shitty nonexistent malware protection is just the way to improve his temper. He’s about to try rebooting, when a message pops up on the screen in brief, binary letters. Indeed, it gets directly to the point.

 _Bring the Mothership,_ it reads, and spits out an address, a date, and a time. _Or they die._


	5. Chapter 5

**IX.**

It’s a long way through the dark forest on the back of a horse, jouncing and jolting, until Lucy is thinking that she doesn’t care where they are going, so much as when they will arrive, and she can get the hell off. She is not the most gifted equestrienne in the world, as proven when they were tracking Flynn and Jesse James, and besides, she wants some answers. It occurs to her that that mission was the one where Flynn found Emma hiding out in the woods, and yet Emma’s clearly calling the shots now. Lucy still hasn’t figured out who exactly their mysterious rescuers are. Their accents are modern American – if she hadn’t guessed it by their unsurprised reaction to the Lifeboat, these are definitely not local nineteenth-century Good Samaritans deciding to charitably help out two lost women and a child. They must be those emergency contacts Emma was talking about, more Mason Industries people, strategically implanted to help stranded time travelers get home. But Lucy has good reason to want to stay away from Mason Industries, and is already starting to wonder just what the odds are of some of Emma’s cohorts just happening to be here, exactly when they need them. History, after all, is a very big place.

At last, they canter through a torchlit gate and up to a stately country house, surrounded on all sides by forest and outbuildings – Maryland, after all, is just south of the Mason-Dixon line, and still officially a slave state, though its free black population is rapidly growing and in another few decades, Lincoln will force it to remain in the Union during the Civil War. If, of course, the Civil War even still happens as it’s supposed to. Lucy, the Lincoln historian, is well aware of this, but this whole situation is reminding her of a rather different adventure, and she’s not sure she likes it. As the man she’s been riding with helps her down, she glances across to see Emma leaping off her own horse and taking hold of Iris. “I’ll see to her, Lucy. You’ve done enough. Go inside and get warm.”

Lucy hesitates. “I want her to come with me.”

“Lady Preston?” Her escort touches her elbow. “The girl will be fine. We really have been waiting to speak with you.”

 _Lady Preston?_ That is even more eyebrow-raising than _ma’am,_ and maybe these guys are just going native after however long in the nineteenth century. Still, Lucy is starting to think that another night at the boarding house would not have been the worst thing in the world. Hopefully they can get the Lifeboat fixed ASAP, because she wants out of here, bad. Then, of course, she remembers that she can’t. She’s stuck.

At any rate, there are at least six of them, they all have guns, and a doctorate from Stanford, while an objectively valuable life accomplishment, doesn’t provide many useful skills in terms of punching your way out of tight corners. That is decidedly Wyatt and Flynn’s department, and they, of course, are not here. Seeing nothing for it, Lucy follows the men inside.

The mansion is well appointed for a house in the middle of nowhere, lux and comfortable, but that’s not the first thing Lucy notices. There are security cameras, some kind of blinking doodad (she is also not the person to ask about this kind of thing, that is Rufus’s lookout) that must run on organic renewable energy of some kind, since there’s no electrical grid to power them. Lucy is shown through a set of double doors and into a sitting room, and at her entrance, a sandy-haired man in his mid-forties turns around and smiles broadly. “Lady Preston! It’s been a while, hasn’t it?”

“Wh…” Lucy stares at him, completely lost. “Wh – do we know – ”

“You saved my life thirty-four years ago, when I was just a boy. And you look exactly the same, so…” He waves a hand at the room. “As you can see, and given the fact that you’re here, it’s true. We’ve built a better clock. And we owe it all to you, my lady. Truly, you are the queen and founding mother of our order, and I promise, everything will be put right.”

At that, in one final, horrible moment, it crashes into place. Lucy feels as if the bottom has dropped out from her world, again, as she stares at him. “John,” she breathes. “John Rittenhouse.”

He appears genuinely pleased that she remembers him. “Indeed. You stopped the madman who murdered my father in cold blood from killing me, and I have never forgotten it. Your bravery, or, dare I say, your beauty. I dedicated myself to carrying on my father’s work, in honor of his memory. And meeting these good gentlemen – ” he indicates the men – the agents – the _Rittenhouse agents_ – “was proof of the theorem. We will, or shortly at any rate, have a fully functional time machine. I cannot wait to travel to the future, to see it for myself. Everything we’ve worked for, at last. Our legacy. Mine and yours.”

His face is glowing with ardency and belief. Lucy wants to be sick. “It’s not my legacy!” she snarls. “I don’t want anything to do with it!”

John Rittenhouse is puzzled. “Of course it’s your legacy. You’re the reason any of it was possible. Perhaps it’s destiny, Lucy. That we’ve met again at last. But then, we worked very hard to make it happen. It wasn’t easy. You’ve been difficult to get hold of.”

Lucy grips the back of the davenport until her knuckles go white. “Emma,” she says, stomach heaving. “Emma is – has been – a Rittenhouse agent. This entire time.”

“Of course she has.” John smiles again. “Our best and brightest, the only one we thought capable of the strength and guile it would take to pull this off. She convinced the madman to come here, you know. To this year, this place. She knew he would not be able to resist the lure of Fort McHenry – such a tiny, insignificant piece, given the larger goal. The point was, we knew you’d follow him. And circumstances were arranged, arranged so beautifully, so that you would choose to send your protectors away at last, and have no choice but to come to us alone. The beauty, the precision, the elegance. See, Lucy? See?”

She does. This is a trap to which even the word _Machiavellian_ does no justice. Flynn didn’t erase her. Rittenhouse did. Everything that has happened in 1814 has been because of Rittenhouse maneuvering to get her on her own, away from the men, here with John who is clearly more than half convinced that they’ll get married and rule the world together, with the Lifeboat already in their hands and the Mothership about to be as well by the sounds of things, with her rendered utterly dependent on them for her future existence. This is so beyond bad that it isn’t even catastrophic. It is apocalyptic.

“You look pale, my dear,” John goes on, when Lucy says nothing. “Sit down. I’ll get you a cup of tea.”

 _“I-don’t-want-your-fucking-tea.”_ She’d throw it in his face. She is so far beyond angry that it is boiling in her very bones. Iris. Oh God. Iris, where is Iris? She’s delivered her directly into the jaws of the serpent. All Emma’s odd questions about how long Lucy has been sleeping with Flynn, and whether she might get pregnant, likewise make sickening sense. David Rittenhouse was also nastily interested in whether she had reproduced yet, and was certainly planning to assist her in that aim. Emma was scouting out to make sure that Lucy wouldn’t turn up here accidentally expecting Time Terrorist Junior. Bit of an awkward situation if she’s supposed to be the Bride of Rittenhouse, and breed a super-race of crazy cultist clockmakers with a side hobby of world domination. Jesus, fucking, _Christ._

John frowns. He still seems slightly baffled that she isn’t rushing to thank him for all this. “Now, Lucy,” he says, in a be-gentle-with-the-mental-patient sort of voice. “I know you’ve been living with our enemies for quite a while, and of course you have a distorted view of our aims and activities. I do need you to not to attempt anything foolish while we’re getting everything into place. I’m sure you’ll come around, of course, but it’s delicate, so – ”

“I will not.” Lucy is actually seeing red. “I am never joining you.”

John smiles patronizingly. “Yes,” he says. “Of course you will.”

If there is one thing Lucy Preston hates, it’s people – _men –_ knowing her future, or thinking they do, and trying to force it on her accordingly. She reaches stealthily behind her for the heavy branched candelabra on the sideboard. As John takes a step toward her, raising a hand as if to caress her cheek, Lucy rips it up and slams him over the head with it, hard as she possibly can.

He yelps and staggers, blood spurting from a gash on his forehead, momentarily blinded by the scalding candle wax, and Lucy runs for it. “Iris? IRIS!” She races down the corridor, realizing that she is about to become a horse thief, and nowhere is far enough for her to go, not when the Lifeboat’s dead and she doesn’t know how to pilot it anyway. Maybe ride hell-for-leather to Fort McHenry again and try to get Cochrane to shield her, with no answers about where Flynn’s gone or even who he really was. Oh God. Oh God oh God oh God. _“IRIS!”_

She sprints around the corner and headlong into four Rittenhouse agents coming the other way. They grab her by the arms and hoist her off her feet as she kicks and curses at them, struggling and spitting, and haul her down the corridor to a door at the end. It opens into a narrow back room, one of them unbars a trapdoor in the floor, and dumps Lucy into something that looks like a root cellar – a tiny, dingy, dark bolthole. The grate slams down, and locks.

Panic sears Lucy’s throat, twisting her in half. She’s trapped. Oh God, oh _God_ she’s trapped, she is in that coffin in the Murder Castle and H.H. Holmes is sharpening his knives, and there is even no oracle for her to play to beguile herself out. She screams and claws at the trapdoor, bloodying her fingers, crawling in a circle. The walls, the walls are devouring her. She’s using up her air. Her chest jerks and shudders. There is not enough space. She’s going to die in here.

Think, Lucy. _Think._ You’re stronger than this. You are more than your fear. Get a grip. Logic. Sense. Reason. Lists. Lists are good. How about the presidents? Recite the presidents in order.

_George Washington._

She met him, God, she met him, thirty-four years ago when he wanted Benedict Arnold caught, and then she saved John Rittenhouse’s life –

_John Adams._

_Thomas Jefferson._

She saved him in 1787, when she chained Flynn to a bed to stop him from going after the Constitutional Convention – remembers that Jefferson was an admirer of David Rittenhouse, he was another one, another one –

_James Madison._

He’s president right now, but it’s changed, it’s all changed –

_James Monroe._

_John Quincy Adams._

_Andrew Jackson._

The Trail of Tears. They were there. They were there, she saw it, Jackson did that, Rittenhouse whispering in his ear. This used to be a sterile, comforting recitation of established facts for Lucy, her solace and her happy place, theories and arguments and books. But now it is a wild, chaotic, terrifying swirl of unsettled scales and change and catastrophe, her own culpability in it wondering if any choice she has ever made mattered, or it’s still led her to this. _Has_ she been saving history, or saving Rittenhouse? Is John right? _Queen and founding mother of our order._

 _You, Lucy,_ the darkness whispers to her.

_You._

_You._

_You._

Lucy drifts into an exhausted, miserable doze eventually, from which she is jerked by the trapdoor rattling and a spear of sunlight falling on her face, feeling like a mushroom shut up too long in the dark. She squints and grimaces as rough hands haul her out; she wants to fight, but her legs are rubbery, she’s starving and trembling and still terrified, and she needs to pick her moment carefully. She puts up no resistance as they march her off to a drawing room where she sees clothes laid out that are clearly at least a decade ahead of 1814. So they’re planning to travel. Did Emma fix the Lifeboat? _What_ the –

Lucy struggles out of her filthy clothes and into the new ones, because yes, she is going to keep an eye on these assholes somehow. How exactly she plans to do that, she’s not sure, given that she’s still convinced that she’ll be erased if she tries to leave this year. But if the restriction only applies to her present lifetime – i.e. she can’t go anywhere between 1983-2017, because she does not exist when she was supposed to, but she can still move around the past – then that might be less of a problem. _Ghost in the machine,_ she thinks. Forever exiled from her own time, banging aimlessly around history, without any home or place to settle for long. Once it might have sounded like a dream come true. Now it’s nothing but an unending, impossible nightmare.

Once she’s made herself look less of a disaster, she straightens her back, locks her knees, and opens the door to find Emma standing on the other side of it, clearly waiting for her. “Wow,” Lucy spits at her. “Thanks for saving us. Man, we’re in your debt.”

Emma shrugs. “I did save us, so you’re welcome. Come on, John’s waiting.”

“What is this? Our freaky cultist marriage ceremony?” Lucy rears back. “Don’t think for a _second_ that I’m going to – ”

“No, he’d rather marry you when you want to. It’s a bit pathetic, but he is honestly rather in love with you, and thinks you’ll change your mind. No, we have another trip to make first. I’ve gotten the Lifeboat enough gas to make one short-term jump, but that’s all it needs to do. We’re going to 1829 to get the Mothership.”

“1829?” Lucy stares at her. “What makes you think it’s going to be there?”

“Oh,” Emma says. “I think it’ll be there.”

_“What did you – ”_

Lucy takes a furious step, but the clunk of a gun being cocked stops her. “Close enough, Preston.” Emma’s voice is cool and low and dangerous. “Trust me, I don’t want to shoot you. It would make the higher-ups very mad, especially John. But I wouldn’t press your luck.”

Lucy stares back at her with utter and complete contempt. “Wow,” she says again, after a moment. “You’re a true believer, aren’t you? Some of the other members, they must just use Rittenhouse for money or power or connections or whatever else, but you, no. You’re a zealot. You actually buy into everything they want to do, no matter the cost. No wonder they chose you to get in with Flynn, make him work with you.”

“Like that was hard,” Emma says, beckoning Lucy with the gun. “Just keep telling him how awful Rittenhouse was, how I’d do anything to bring it down, how I had so much proof of their depravity to give him. He ate it up. He’s not nearly as smart as he thinks he is, by the way. Mind you, there were a few times when I thought he might cotton onto me, but he didn’t _want_ to kill me – especially after Anthony, and especially since he’d have no pilot – and I used that to my advantage. Remember when you thought I was sleeping with him? That was amusing.  I did consider whether I might have to try to seduce him, if he got too many ideas about getting rid of me. But it wouldn’t have worked. I’m pretty sure you’re the only woman he ever actually thinks about, no matter all his talk about doing this for his wife and daughter. Reads your stupid journal all the time. Thought you could do anything. So this is going to really sting, won’t it?”

Lucy wants to kill her, but they have reached the main hall, a bruised and black-eyed John Rittenhouse is waiting for them, and makes her a cordial bow, apparently not holding too much of a grudge for the candelabra incident last night. “Lucy! Are you ready?”

“I think I preferred _Lady Preston,_ ” Lucy growls under her breath, ignoring his offered arm. She is terrified to ask where Iris is – no way they’re wasting that much of a valuable hostage, she is most likely still alive, but for how long? “And why are we going to 1829?”

“Well,” John says. He looks like a kid in a candy store. “It’s my first trip forward, and this is the year, so I’m told, that one Andrew Jackson becomes president. He’s one of ours. We’re traveling to March 4, 1829 – the day he’s sworn in. And it’s the meeting. The Rittenhouse meeting.”

“What meeting?”

“Our quad-centennial meeting. The last one was in 1804, just after the Louisiana Purchase – Jefferson was also one of ours, by the way. It happens every twenty-five years. And given that we are going to acquire the Mothership at this one, I think it’s especially vital that I attend in person, so we can map out how history goes forward from such a pivotal moment. You are, of course, welcome to help me, if you understand what your true identity is.”

Lucy gives him a demure, closed-mouth smile. Inside, her mind is racing. They must have found a way to make contact with Flynn, Wyatt, and Rufus in 2017, order them to travel to 1829 to meet them, and surrender the Mothership. This of course is the worst possible outcome. Maybe they won’t come. Maybe they can be persuaded to stay away, in the name of the larger cause.

So, at least, Lucy hopes vainly for a few seconds. She doesn’t _want_ to die as a martyr, but she also can’t rule out the idea, if it means Rittenhouse won’t become all-powerful. Then she considers what the odds are that the terrible threesome, much as they may hate each other, _won’t_ absolutely drop everything and go barreling through history if she’s in danger. No matter the cost. No matter the risk.

“Slim” is not a kind enough word for it.

* * *

“Washington D.C., March 4, 1829.” Rufus stares at the screen. “That’s when these mysterious computer-crashing gremlins want us to go with the Mothership, or ‘they’ die. And is this way too much of a stretch, or does anyone else get the feeling that that means Lucy, Iris, and Emma?”

There’s a loud curse and a crash behind him, and he whirls to see that Flynn has just kicked over a display of middle-grade children’s chapterbooks, at which there is no question of them remaining further in the library. They grab their things and speed out chased by a flock of furious middle-aged women, Rufus and Wyatt dragging Flynn between them, and into the dark parking lot. They barely get across it before they all start yelling at each other at once.

“I should have known this was some kind of trick! By them! By Rittenhouse!” Flynn looks quite honestly deranged. “Now they’ll kill my daughter again, all because we left them behind in the past by themselves, without – ”

“YEAH, FLYNN, MAYBE IF YOU HADN’T FUCKIN’ _ERASED LUCY,_ WE WOULDN’T HAVE THIS PROBLEM!” Wyatt is 0.00001 seconds away from breaking his promise to her and throttling the life out of certain utterly insufferable tall, dark, and Eastern European prize-winning douchenozzles with his bare hands, and Rufus looks as if he’s thinking about helping. “You forget that part, huh? About how this is _all your fault?”_

Flynn raises his hands to his face and drops them. He breathes like a tempest, struggling to control himself. He whirls on a heel, storms to the end of the alley, stops, and stares up at the heavens, clearly wondering why he can’t just be smote down now and put an end to it. Then he turns and walks back, with far more control than he evidently feels. “Right then, soldier,” he says, vicious with mockery. “What’s your _plan_ for the situation?”

Wyatt wants to know why it’s _him_ to solve this heaping helping of shit sandwich that Garcia “Still The Worst” Flynn has loaded onto their plates, but there is only one possible answer. “We have to go. We have to rescue Lucy. I – we – we can’t lose her. We can’t let this happen.”

“Man, you know I want the same thing,” Rufus says. “But – _give Rittenhouse the Mothership?_ Wyatt, we – all of us – care about Lucy. In our own ways. I think it’s the only thing we all have in common, in fact. But if we land there, they’ll be on us like white on rice. You know how bad it would be.”

“You can’t be seriously suggesting that we don’t save Lucy.”

“I’m not. I’m suggesting we be smart about it.” Rufus looks nervous but resolute. “Before somebody who I won’t mention kidnapped Anthony, he was working on something that was exactly intended to prevent the Mothership from being stolen. A second layer of safeguard. It was a program that would lock the controls and put the Mothership on autopilot – a remote retrieval, basically, so if the human pilot died on a mission, we could log into its computer from the present and still drive it home by itself. I don’t think he finished it, so we didn’t have time to install it before Someone, still not mentioning him, did his thing. I might have been able to patch it in from the Lifeboat, but _Someone, still not mentioning him,_ also _happened_ to cut the cord between the Lifeboat and the Mothership. And we don’t have the Lifeboat, anyway.”

“So?” Flynn growls, clearly vastly chafed by this passive-aggressive (barely passive, anyway) shade-throwing. “What good does that do us?”

“This.” Rufus lifts his chin. “If I can get that software and install it on the Mothership, I can lock its pilot console. I’d stay here in 2017 and drive you guys remotely into 1829 like an underwater deep-sea robot. That way, even if Rittenhouse did get their hands on it, they wouldn’t be able to use it. The only way it would run was if I pulled you out. They could sit in it all and press all the buttons they wanted, but only another expert-level pilot would be able to override it, and Rittenhouse doesn’t have one of those.”

“Split up _again?”_ Wyatt repeats incredulously. “After how well the last time went?”

“Yeah, I know.”

“And how do we get the software, anyway?”

“Well,” Rufus says, scratching his ear. “That’s the tricky part.”

“Oh,” Flynn murmurs witheringly. _“That’s_ the tricky part.”

“Shut up, Flynn.” Wyatt looks back at Rufus, eyes widening as it hits him. “Shit. It’s in Mason Industries, isn’t it? Probably buried deep in some encrypted server, and only you know how to get it out. But you might not even work there anymore, so who’s getting us inside the – ”

He pauses. “Oh, _shit.”_

“Yeah,” Rufus says grimly. “Gotta convince Jiya to fall for me and take a chance on smuggling a perfect stranger into her top-secret workplace to steal a bit of dangerous code for a time machine in what, five minutes? Should be a gas.”

It’s about thirty minutes later, in fact, when they’re back on Jiya’s doorstep – Flynn loudly protesting this plan and insisting they just take the damn place by storm like he did last time, Wyatt making equally loud comments that of course the terrorist thinks that is a good idea – and both of them shutting up on the spot when Jiya opens the door, sees them, and starts to slam it. “What? I told you weirdoes to get lost!”

“Jiya.” Rufus has wedged his foot in the door, and grimaces when it hits it, but doesn’t budge. “Look. I know this is incredibly bizarre and I can’t explain it, but… let’s just say that I know what Connor Mason was working on, and so do you. We both know that it was possible that if it was used, we’d come back and the world might be… different. Well, we have, and it’s important,  and a friend of ours is really in danger. I know you don’t remember her either, but her name is Lucy. You like her. We all do.”

Jiya frowns at him, but slightly less certainly than before. “How do you know about Mason – ”

“Because I work there,” Rufus says. “In the other timeline. And in that timeline, like I said, we… well… we’re sort of, you know. Together. You love Indian food and you have this Twitter account where you say all these incredibly smart and funny things, and you’re bitchin’ at like, all the video games but especially _Assassin’s Creed,_ and the best vacation you ever took was to that tech convention in Tokyo in 2014 where it rained the whole time and you just got to wander around and test all the gizmos. You’re such a nerd and you’re always changing up your nail polish and you secretly love sappy movies and cry every time the dog dies, because you have the biggest heart of anyone I know and I… I don’t deserve you. I never really have. But you still like me for some reason, and I.” He swallows. “I… sort of… love you.”

Wyatt and Flynn glance at each other, without meaning to.

Jiya blinks, clearly startled. She opens and shuts her mouth as Rufus continues to stand there, gazing at her with desperate hope. “And,” he goes on. “I know you have no reason to, but I need you to believe me, and I need you to help us. We need to get into Mason Industries. Tonight.”

Jiya blinks again, rubbing her eyes as if hoping to wake up from this dream. She starts to look away, but he doesn’t. “I…”

“Look, girl!” Flynn takes a step, but Wyatt throws out an arm to catch him smartly across the chest. “It’s important!”

Jiya surveys them for a few moments, up and down. She bites her lip. Then, and all at once, she turns around. “Okay,” she says, barely above a whisper. “I’ll get my keys.”

* * *

“Rufus, you’re a badass,” Wyatt mutters, as they pull up in front of Mason Industries in Jiya’s car, step out, and wait tensely as she swipes them in with her ID card. Even in this reality where they’re not wanted criminals, it feels ludicrously exposed to be strolling in like this, and all of them flinch as the cameras swivel over. “How long is this going to take?”

“Shouldn’t be too long. Breaking the decrypt is the hardest part.” Rufus takes a deep breath as they follow Jiya inside the gloomy steel warehouse. “Then, well, the software is kind of, that is, it _is_ very much is in beta, so – ”

 _“Now_ you’re telling us this?” Wyatt stops in his tracks. “No. None of this remote-retrieval business.  It’s too dangerous. You come with us. I’m not losing you either.”

“No!” Rufus stares back at him fiercely. “Listen to me! Wyatt, you know we can’t let Rittenhouse have the Mothership, and we can’t race in there like idiots, just like they’re hoping we will, to save the women without thinking of the consequences! Besides, if God forbid something does go wrong and you have to get home in the Lifeboat, it only fits three people, remember? One of us has to stay behind so there’s a spot for Lucy! It comes down to this. Do you trust me to do my job or not?”

“Of course I trust you. That’s why I don’t want to leave you!”

“Then that’s why you have to.” Rufus remains unyielding. “If I can get this patched in, I am the only one who can drive the Mothership, and that means I have to do it on autopilot, from here. Otherwise it won’t work. This way, you and _him_ go, break heads, and get things straightened out so Lucy can come home. I stay here and pull you out. Yeah, you bastard, even you,” he adds, raising his voice and looking pointedly at Flynn. “Believe me, I’d like nothing better than to leave you behind, but she seems to see some redeeming qualities in you. No clue what those are. So you still get a ride back. Don’t make me regret it.”

“If you stay here to drive the autopilot,” Wyatt says quietly, “and the timeline switches back to ours, you could be sitting in a roomful of Rittenhouse agents.”

Rufus considers. Then he says calmly, “Fine. I’ll take that risk. And drive you somewhere away from here. If I go down, you three keep fighting.”

Wyatt looks at him helplessly. Then Flynn calls, “If you two are not going to make out, perhaps you could get on with what we came here to do?”

Rufus swears under his breath, turns to the terminal, and boots it up, overriding its login screen in about half an instant. Jiya’s eyes go wide as his fingers fly over the keys. “You… you really do work here, don’t you?”

“Told you.” Rufus enters a few commands, deletes them when they don’t work, and starts running some kind of complicated algorithm. It takes him a while to locate the program, which is only half-finished, and then compile the extra code, as Wyatt and Flynn are getting antsy. He tries a few launches, which don’t work. Jiya suggests something, and he tries that instead. Wyatt and Flynn are practically climbing the walls. Then at last, with a whoosh and a flash and a _pop_ of bent space-time, the Mothership whirls into existence on the launch pad in front of them. Wyatt briefly wonders if there is a _second_ Mothership and Lifeboat here in this timeline, and then decides he would rather not go into that. His head hurts enough as it is.

“Yes!” Rufus crows, punching the air, as he finishes the execute command, copies the program onto a drive, and goes up the steps to check that it’s been properly implanted. Once it is installed, the Mothership can only be driven from this computer bank here. God, Wyatt hopes that the universe does not choose this moment for technical difficulties. The entire reason they’re running this risk, after all, is so they can stand a chance of winning the battle (rescuing Lucy) and not losing the whole war (letting Rittenhouse get their hands on the damn thing and torch history even more spectacularly than Flynn – much as he hates the son of a bitch, Wyatt knows by now he’s not the worst thing out there, not by a long shot). This will work, it has to. Maybe. Maybe.

“Okay,” Rufus says. “It’s installed. We don’t have time for tests, but I think it’s running properly. So if you two can not kill each other before you get there, that would be good.”

Wyatt considers that just him and Flynn alone in a time machine is going to be very, very interesting. Too much so, in fact. But they have to get to March 4th, 1829. They have to. It’s screaming in his head – and again, no matter what he thinks of Flynn, it’s clear that he’s frantic too. For his daughter, yes. But also for Lucy. Not that Wyatt has forgiven him at all for getting them into this situation, but at least there’s that.

Wyatt and Rufus clap each other hard on the shoulder, aware that if this goes wrong, this might be the last time they see each other. Then Wyatt and Flynn go up the stairs of the Mothership, strap in, and stare at each other in tense silence, as the door cycles shut. On the video screen, they see Rufus return to the command chair and start up the launch. He raises a hand. _Good luck._

 _We who are about to die salute you,_ Wyatt thinks. He pulls the seatbelt tighter. If this doesn’t work, he’s killing Flynn. It won’t fix it, but it’ll make him feel better.

The lights flash. The engine revs. Wyatt looks back. Just once.

Then the world is gone.

* * *

March 4th, 1829, in Washington D.C. is a festive occasion, red-white-and-blue bunting strung up everywhere and onlookers turning out to crowd the streets, newspapers and souvenirs being flogged as at any public event and plenty of optimism that President Andrew Jackson is just the man to get the damn redcoats out of the chunk of New England they have been squatting in for the past fifteen years, ever since the fall of Fort McHenry and the sporadic, ongoing battles to chase them out. This is strange enough that it almost gives Lucy vertigo, even as she can’t help thinking that if the North is still partially under British occupation and control, there is no way it’s going to be able to get its act together for the Civil War in another few decades. Is that what happens? The Union loses? Oh _Jesus._

She is keeping a sharp eye out for her chance to get away from John and Emma, as she has no intention of attending this Rittenhouse meeting with them. John is absolutely delighted by everything – if this is how he feels going just fifteen years ahead of his own time, Lucy thinks, he’d be floored by her future. Not, of course, that she intends to let him get there. She remembers her own delight at first beholding the past in the flesh, in full color, and then pushes it away. John is so happy because he thinks he’s finally on the verge of controlling it. Of dominating it. Putting all those hands of the clock exactly where he wants them.

It takes Lucy a bit, but once they’re in the crowds by the muddy road, waiting to see President Jackson ride by in his carriage to the grandstand, she finally manages to give her companions the slip. Ducks low, shooting out the back of the crowd and starting to move. She doesn’t know exactly where she’s going, but if Rittenhouse put out some kind of lure to get the boys here, they’ll be arriving soon. They’re not going to leave her behind, for better or worse. But they also don’t know just how monstrous of a trap this is.

She can’t exactly ask anyone if they’ve seen a glowing futuristic white orb recently, so she isn’t sure what the quickest way to find them is. She doesn’t have much time; John and Emma must have noticed her absence by now. She searches up and down, heart hammering. This is insane, this is insane, there’s absolutely no chance that she’s going to just –

_“Lucy?”_

She really does stop breathing at that. Whirls around, locks eyes with Wyatt, who clearly can’t believe what they’re telling him, and they remain frozen for an instant longer. Then they rush at each other, throw themselves into each other’s arms, and hug the breath out of each other in total disbelief, talking over each other. Lucy is trying to explain to him that apparently she can travel, just not back to the present, and he’s babbling something about how much history has changed in said present, and then she recovers herself and remembers the important point. “Flynn. Where’s Flynn? Where’s Rufus? Did you three figure out how to – Wyatt, listen, it wasn’t Flynn who erased me. It was Rittenhouse.”

Wyatt stares at her with creased brow. “What are you talking about?”

“Rittenhouse. John Rittenhouse, Emma tricked Flynn into going to 1814 so he could get his hands on me. It’s a trap, it’s all a trap.” Lucy’s words are spilling over each other, not making much sense. “She’s Rittenhouse, she’s a double agent, she’s been working for them the whole time. John knows, the whole time he’s been planning for this, for – ”

Wyatt continues to stare at her in incomprehension. But at that, his gaze flares with shock. “What? _Emma?_ Emma _Whitmore?_ She’s a traitor, she –?”

“Yes.” Lucy grips his jacket. “It was all a plan to get me away from you and Flynn and Rufus. We have to go, we have to find her, we – ”

“We met her,” Wyatt says. His face has gone white. “Jesus, we met her. Coming in, right after we landed. Told her to head back to the Mothership and wait for us there. What – _Jesus, are you saying –_ ”

“Where’s Rufus?” Lucy’s voice almost rises to a scream. “Where’s Flynn?”

“Rufus stayed behind. In 2017. Long story. Flynn – ” Wyatt stops. “He was with me when we landed, I don’t – Lucy, if Emma’s Rittenhouse, _we told her where the Mothership is –_ ”

They stare at each other a moment longer. Then they whirl and run.

It’s a torturous sprint out of the crowded city. Lucy doesn’t know how they can be here if Rufus isn’t – neither Wyatt nor Flynn can pilot the machines themselves, after all – but that appears to be a question for later. They veer and dodge and hurtle and run harder, until they finally blast into the treed grove where the Mothership must have landed. And do so just in time to see Emma Whitmore point her gun, pull the trigger, and hear the shot go off like thunder.

Garcia Flynn staggers, blood blooming on his shoulder, but he still tries to charge her. Emma shoots again. “That, by the way,” she yells, “is from Lucy. She was the one who handed Iris over to us, you know. So I’m sure you’ll have a _lot_ to talk about.”

Flynn roars, even as Emma vanishes inside the Mothership and the door cycles shut. He runs toward it, grabbing it, as if he’ll keep it there with his bare hands – even though if it jumps when he’s still holding it, he’ll be scraped gruesomely out of existence worse than being dragged by a freight train. It’s only Lucy’s scream that makes him turn his head. _“NO!”_

Startled, he lets go, as Wyatt jumps past, draws his gun, and starts firing. Bullets pop and bang off the hull – if he can shoot it like Flynn’s goons did to the Lifeboat in 1754, disable it – Emma shouldn’t be able to drive it – but what did Rufus say? _Only another expert-level pilot would be able to override it, and Rittenhouse doesn’t have one of those._ Except, of course, they do. Emma knows it possibly even better than he does. If she overrides it, if she jumps –

 _The flaw in the plan,_ Wyatt thinks madly. And holy _shit_ , what a flaw.

He gets a shot off, close to the Mothership’s main motivator. It’s taking Emma longer than usual to launch; it’s clear that even she can’t get around the autopilot lock immediately, and Wyatt feels a brief, savage pride in Rufus’ genius. He shoots again. Sure, it might mean that he is stranded in the Jackson administration for the rest of his life, but it’s still better than letting Rittenhouse have it. Lucy is on her knees, trying to get to Flynn, who is completely beside himself. He struggles with his good arm to get out his own gun, aims, and fires.

Something blows on the Mothership with a cascade of sparks. But it’s too late. The next instant, it flashes out of sight, out of existence, rippling the trees. If she jumped successfully, or if she didn’t – if she’s stuck somewhere just outside the space-time continuum – Wyatt has no idea.

He turns around. Lucy’s face is dead white. Flynn has been shot at least twice, and he’s losing blood. Rufus is back in 2017. Emma has the Mothership. Rittenhouse has Iris. All the curse words Wyatt can think of – and believe him, he can think of a lot – still seem insufficient to encompass the terribleness of the situation. Even the world’s most prolific porn star has never been as fucked as they presently are.

“Flynn.” It’s Lucy’s voice that breaks the silence. “Garcia. _Garcia.”_

Wyatt has never heard her sound like that. It twists something in his gut.

Flynn doesn’t answer. He presses a hand to his bloodstained shoulder, but it’s clearly not that pain that he feels the most acutely. “They have her?” he whispers. “They have Iris? _You gave her to them?”_

“Listen – it was a trap, all right? It was a trap.” Lucy chokes on a sob. “I didn’t – Emma – ”

Flynn closes his eyes as if he doesn’t want to go on existing just then. As if the one thing worse than losing something, someone, is thinking that you might have somehow, miraculously found them again, against every and any odd – and then realizing that you haven’t. That it is exactly what you feared. Wyatt is still determined to hate him with every fiber of his being, but that twists an unwanted stab of sympathy into him. Losing Jess once was bad enough. Having to go through it again would completely destroy him.

“We have to get you looked after,” Wyatt says at last, barely above a whisper. “Then we have to find the Lifeboat, somehow make contact with Rufus, and get the remote-retrieval program installed in there, so he can pull us out. It’s the only way we’re getting home.”

Flynn stares at him with utterly flat dark eyes. He clearly doesn’t give a single damn.

“Garcia,” Lucy says again. _“Please.”_

Flynn considers it. Tries to get to his feet, and reels. Without intending to, Wyatt lunges to catch him, as Lucy darts in from the other side. They manage to hold him up, if barely. He is considerably bigger than either of them.

“Fine,” he says at last, and spits blood. “And then I’m going to kill everyone.”


	6. Chapter 6

**X.**

The door shuts with a thump, Wyatt mutters something about could that proprietor have been giving them any more side-eye (to be fair, turning up with an injured, clearly dangerous, armed lunatic in tow does tend to have that effect) and he and Lucy heave Flynn onto the bed as he continues to glare red murder at both of them. His bullet wounds aren’t life-threatening, but they still need attention, and to judge from the amount of blood already spattered on his jacket, that should be sooner rather than later. Wyatt desperately needs to go back out and find the Lifeboat before John Rittenhouse comes looking for it (let him be good and distracted at this meeting of his, Lucy prays) and to try to find a way to contact Rufus. And as germ theory, Louis Pasteur, and Robert Koch are still another forty years away, any surgeon they can find here will be only marginally better than useless. Lucy knows more about it than they will, and she’s a doctor of history, not medicine. They had enough trouble finding a boarding house as it is, with the city packed for the inauguration, and Lucy isn’t sure she wants to draw attention to herself or their hiding place by going out and looking. “Wyatt,” she says. “You go. I’ll… take care of things on this end.”

He cocks a skeptical eyebrow at her. “Really? With him sitting there looking like he wants to bite your head – or other parts of you – off?”

“I can hear both of you, you know,” Flynn growls. “In case you were wondering.”

Wyatt shoots a black look at him, then turns back to Lucy, putting a protective hand on her arm. “Look,” he says, still more quietly. “I don’t know everything that happened while we were apart, and this is bad enough. But if Flynn has it in his head to hurt you for something – ”

“He’s not going to hurt me.” Let Flynn overhear that, if he’s so inclined. “You know we need the Lifeboat back online yesterday. I’ll figure something out. Rittenhouse could be sending out a squad to get it right now, and if we lose it too, we’re done for. Take care of yourself, okay?”

Wyatt pauses for a long and loathing moment, then nods tersely. His hand lingers on her arm (something that Lucy most assuredly sees Flynn’s eyes flicker to, for all his affection of viciously ignoring them) and then he lets go, turns away, and checks that he has his gun and it’s loaded. He takes Flynn’s too, with a very pointed look. Then he lets himself out, footsteps thumping away down the hall, and Lucy and Flynn are left alone in the small room, staring each other down, the tension thick enough to not only cut with a knife but serve for dessert lightly chilled. For the longest moment, neither of them says anything. Then Lucy goes to the wardrobe, opens one of the drawers, and starts rummaging around. Flynn watches her until curiosity finally gets the better of anger. “What on earth are you doing?”

“Trying to figure out how to stop you from being a dead body sewn into a mattress,” Lucy says shortly. “You could be the origin of the urban legend, you know.”

Taken by surprise, Flynn barks a laugh, which turns into a grimace as more blood soaks into his jacket. Then he glares at her, evidently resenting her even more for it, and Lucy struggles with a brief and intense desire to just pick up the cast-iron coal scuttle and brain him with it. Instead she pulls out sewing scissors, a needle and thread, some rags, a bottle of the kind of old-timey medicine that proudly lists its ingredients as alcohol, cocaine, morphine, heroin, “and other Healthfull Substances,” and a bizarre metal instrument that can work as tweezers. She scoops them all up, goes downstairs to the kitchen, and quietly asks the black maid who works there (she hopes she’s free, not a slave, but history has not been designed to make white women feel comfortable) for some boiling water. For the man upstairs. He’s hurt, and she needs to tend him.

The maid is skeptical, but also doesn’t want the trouble of a death on the premises, and agrees to boil all Lucy’s tools and rags, although she clearly has no idea why. Lucy tells her it’s a new theory in Paris, from whence they have recently arrived (hopefully this will account for any strangeness of their clothes or behavior – when in doubt, blame the French) and the maid nods gamely. Then, when the tools are well boiled and thus as sterile as they are going to get, Lucy washes her hands in some of the water that is as hot as she can stand it, scrubs them with the cake of rough lye soap, rinses, and takes her impromptu surgical kit back upstairs.

She half expects Flynn to have pushed open the window and escaped, limping across the city leaving a trail of blood, with a Bowie knife in his teeth to track down John Rittenhouse and gut him like a pig in front of his horrified disciples, but he’s still there, more bad-tempered than ever. “Are you done looking for your craft supplies yet?”

“I’m trying to stop you from dying of gangrene,” Lucy informs him coolly. She knows he’s upset, she knows he’s hurt, but she’s still not intending to sit here and not give him a few whacks with the reins, especially if he is doing his stubborn-ass routine and jerking them every which way. “Take off your shirt.”

He arches an eyebrow at her in a way that clearly says he has about a hundred comments to make here, but will, for the moment, charitably forbear. He reaches up with a grunt of pain, loosens his cravat, and unwinds it, pulling it off his neck, and then unbuttons his shirt, struggling to get it over his head. Then he looks at her defiantly. As if to say, here he is. Take or leave him.

Lucy can’t help glancing at him sidelong as she reaches for the tweezers. Despite everything they’ve done, she hasn’t really seen him naked; their trysts have generally taken place with most of their clothes on, grasping and swift and greedy, falling into each other and burning up and rushing on separate orbits again, until they inevitably crash together once more. He has plenty of old scars that must come from his clandestine services days. Her eyes trace over the breadth of his shoulders, the heavy muscles of his arms, the solidness of his barrel chest and the slight jut of his hipbones. The bullet wounds are in his left shoulder – fortunately not in the meat, that would be tricky and bloody – and low on his right side. Clean exit through the shoulder, a fragment still left in his side. Lucy normally faints at the sight of blood, and she’s feeling more than a little woozy now, but she is still the only one who is going to handle this.

Lucy glances at him, as if to say that she will unavoidably have to come closer, and he flicks an insolent look at her, but doesn’t protest. She slides the chair up to the bed and sits between his knees, moving to explore the bruised, lacerated flesh with the tweezers, as he sucks in his breath slightly but is too Slavic-stoic to show other obvious discomfort. She wonders suddenly where he grew up. His mother was from Texas, as American as apple pie, but she doesn’t know where Asher Flynn was from. The half-brother he saved, Gabriel, now lives in Paris. He was an asset for the NSA embedded in Eastern Europe, and to judge from the accent, his first language is probably one of those, though he speaks English flawlessly. Probably others. There is so much of who this man is, who he used to be, that is so burned and buried far beneath this blackened shell, this wreck of him, nothing left but the promise of vengeance, the fading dream of solace. Of rightness. Of happiness. Of goodness. Of ease. He must wonder if he had imagined all of it.

Flynn shifts and grunts as Lucy locates the bullet fragment and carefully disentangles it, pulling it out and dropping it on a cloth. She has to look away, light-headed, at the fresh scarlet ooze that results, and Flynn notices her reaction. “Don’t like blood, do you?”

“Or small spaces, no.” Lucy tries to keep her tone matter-of-fact, but she remembers her confinement in Rittenhouse’s root cellar last night (and, you know, fifteen years ago) and her voice trembles slightly. She can taste bile in the back of her throat, and swallows hard. “I’m not really cut out for adventures outside of books.”

“And yet,” Flynn says, with something either mockery or sincerity. It’s always so hard to tell with him. “Here you are.”

“I think that’s thanks to you.” Right, she can do this. One more hard gulp, and Lucy gets back to the task at hand. Rinses the tweezers in a diluted concentrate of the alcohol-cocaine-morphine-heroin super-solution, wets a folded rag with it, and presses it to Flynn’s side, as he hisses through his teeth at the sting. Yeah, that stuff probably packs quite a wallop. More than Bactine, that’s for sure. Once it’s mostly stopped bleeding, she takes the rags away and tries to judge if she can stitch it. God, she really doesn’t want to do that. Maybe she can wait until Wyatt comes back. He was in the army, he has to know about field medicine, and besides, he would probably thoroughly enjoy stabbing Flynn a few times, even if only with a needle.

“Actually,” Flynn says, with his typical, bullheaded inability to concede an argument, even when he’s getting his bullet-riddled carcass pieced back together, “technically, it’s thanks to _you.”_

“I beg your pardon?” Lucy has been preparing to tackle his shoulder wound, but at that, she starts. “You stole the Mothership, you started all this.”

“Yes,” Flynn says. “Because Mason Industries was making it for Rittenhouse all along. Connor Mason was so far up their ass that he saw daylight whenever they yawned, and I could not let them get it. Ask your friend Rufus if you don’t believe me. Of course,” he adds viciously, “now they _do_ have it, so that’s all gone for nothing, hasn’t it?”

Lucy flinches slightly at the venom in his voice. “Flynn. . . Iris… we’ll get her back, I swear, we’ll find her, we won’t stop – ”

“Is it true? What Emma said? That you handed her over to them?”

“It…” Lucy doesn’t feel up to recounting the whole saga of Emma’s betrayal, especially since she’ll have to tell him about John Rittenhouse, and everything that has come as a result of her stopping Flynn from killing him. “It’s complicated.”

“Complicated,” Flynn repeats, with cold, bitter contempt. “How did I know you were going to say that? Things are always _complicated_ for you, Lucy. You the historian, you the scholar, always looking for so many nuances, so many possibilities, so many arguments. You can’t even acknowledge evil when it’s staring you in the face, you have to try to explain and rationalize your way around it. Like a good little academic. There’s always another _hypothesis._ Something you can publish in a paper, debate about over cocktails at a conference. It’s a game. That’s all this is to you. You’re a coward.”

This is so breathtakingly unfair that Lucy wants to slap him, and yet it strikes at exactly what she was terrified of in the root cellar: that she has been protecting Rittenhouse, not history, because she’s not brave enough to do what it really takes to stop them, and finds this the easier, safer, more existentially comfortable way. She thinks of that saying, how the real enemy of goodness, the thing that allows evil to take root and flourish, is simple indifference. People don’t bother to care, as long as it doesn’t affect them personally. And by the time they do care, it’s too late.

She digs rather more violently into Flynn’s shoulder than she needs to, teeth gritted, not trusting herself to answer. Finally she says, “I did not hand Iris over to them willingly. I never would have. It was a trap. Everything was a trap, set up by Rittenhouse. And you’re not the one who erased me in the present. They did, so I would turn to them, need them, once all of you were gone. We did exactly what they wanted us to, the whole time. Hands on their clock face.”

This takes Flynn aback enough that he doesn’t have another accusation to level at her, and Lucy continues to work on his shoulder. Finally, he says, “What?”

Shortly and succinctly as possible, Lucy explains what happened with Emma. The revelation that she’s Rittenhouse, that she bragged about tricking Flynn into coming here, the meeting with John. The plan to jump them here in the Lifeboat, so he could see in person the results of his glorious enterprise. And now, Emma with the Mothership, and them, well. Fucked.

It’s hard to say what part of this staggers Flynn the most. As Lucy straightens up, needing another opportunity to look away from his shoulder, he repeats, “John Rittenhouse is here.”

“Yes.”

“The same one you stopped me from shooting in 1780.”

“Yes.”

Flynn’s face contorts into something sneering and ugly. “And now he’s a grown man, thinks he’s going to marry the guardian angel who so _benevolently_ saved him when he was a boy, and have a dozen scions of his new master race, does he? I told you! I told you, Lucy! That he believed the same thing as the rest of them, that he would get away and found it anyway! And now it doesn’t matter if I shoot him too, because he’s already planted his foul seeds for years, has dozens, hundreds of followers! _You stopped me, and you’re the reason it happened!”_

“Maybe it was seeing his father gunned down in cold blood that made him make that decision!” A burning red heat rises into Lucy’s cheeks, eyes snapping back at him. She stands up, wanting whatever self-possession she can get for this argument; even sitting, he’s still not much shorter than her. “That’s always the thing about prophecies – whatever you do trying to avert them ends up inadvertently makes them happen instead! It always works that way! Always!”

“Oh? In your _books?”_ A truly horrible light sears Flynn’s face like the flames of hell, and for a moment, Lucy almost is downright afraid of him. “That’s what you mean, isn’t it? It always works that way in your _books!_ Because nobody’s ever tried to do it in real life, nobody’s ever had the ability to actually change history, so we don’t know what the rules are! If I hadn’t killed Rittenhouse, he would have done the same thing! And now, thanks to you, we don’t know if I could have stopped Rittenhouse at the start! Saved everything, everyone! All it would have taken was you to be brave enough to _step aside and let me kill him!”_

“Oh? Me? To be brave enough to stand aside from a deranged man with a gun and let him kill an unarmed, terrified child? That would have been the _brave thing_ in this situation?” Lucy spits back at him, too angry to pull her punches, especially when she’s so sick of him, of this, of everything. “Oh, but yes, I’m a coward. I don’t understand, I have nothing on the line. When I’ve lost my sister and my mother has lied to me my whole life, my father is Rittenhouse, my friends and I are on the run, I can’t go home because I don’t exist, and I’ve been responsible, even without meaning to, for turning your daughter over to Rittenhouse and letting them get the Mothership! While you and I and Wyatt are trapped here, and God knows what Rufus is facing back home, in a history that doesn’t even look like ours! But yes, I forgot. You’re the only one of us to ever lose anything. To ever _understand._ How dare you. _How dare you.”_

She’s almost in tears, taken with a mortal urge to actually hit him, but whirls on her heel and stares at the wall, the silence thundering between them. It feels so good to finally say everything, to lash out at someone, at _him,_ that she could keep going, but she’s too raw already, too weary, too wounded to keep wanting to drive the knife into her own heart and twisting, twisting. Why can’t he just shut up and be a half-decent person for once. Why can’t she just break down in peace. Why isn’t Wyatt here. _He_ might know how to comfort her.

The silence goes on until it is almost physically painful. Then Flynn says, very quietly, “I’m sorry.”

Lucy, who has been braced for another angry reprisal, is caught completely off guard. She doesn’t want to ask him to repeat it in case she misheard. She sniffs instead, smudging her nose with the back of her hand, until most unexpectedly, he touches her chin, lifting her face with his thumb. He looks very tired and older than he is and sick at heart. “I’m sorry,” he says again. “I… I think I’ve put too much on you. That was my mistake. I just…” He trails off, as if trying to think how to put this. “This whole time. I’ve wanted to see _you_ again.”

“What?” Lucy looks up at him, startled. “What do you mean?”

Flynn pauses again, then goes for it. “When I said it was you that started this, not me. I stole the Mothership, I knew about its existence, because I had your journal. Because it told me.”

“My journal.” Lucy still hasn’t gotten how that’s supposed to work. “But where did you get it, when I haven’t even written it yet? How did you get – ?”

He smiles at her. It doesn’t reach his eyes, which look up at her like a drowned creature from the bottom of a well. “You gave it to me, Lucy.”

“I…” She opens and shuts her mouth. “What?”

“I met you two weeks after my wife and daughter – after… they.” He stops, looking away. “You age quite well, just so you know. You comforted me. You told me there was something I could choose to do, if I wanted to, and – after I talked you into it – you gave me the journal. You said we’d be meeting again soon. And we did. At the _Hindenburg_. That first time – for you.”

Lucy’s mouth is still open, but nothing is coming out. She thinks madly of John Rittenhouse, waiting to see her again since he was a boy, and now of Flynn, apparently waiting to see her again as a young woman. If he’s known her older self, if they’ve – if _she’s –_ none of this makes any sense at _all,_ but that is time travel for you. “So you met – me – in 2014. When I gave you the journal, supposedly. But you didn’t steal the Mothership until 2016.”

“Because it said in your journal that it wouldn’t be finished until 2016. It was still two years away from completion in 2014. So I used that time to prepare. To learn everything about where I might be going, about who I would meet, about who I might need to target. Who was Rittenhouse, and what I would have to do to take them down. No matter what.” He looks at her unflinchingly. “I used to wonder if I had in fact dreamed the whole thing. But there was your journal. It gave me something to hold onto. Something to keep going for. So I did.”

This is still a lot more than Lucy feels adequately prepared to take in. She rubs both cold hands over her face, trying to come up with any kind of response, this revelation that this – that _they –_ are so much more than she has ever known. So he does know everything about her, or at least a version of her – a stranger, a person she has never met, the uncanniest of uncanny valleys. And has, all this time, been hungering to get back the one person he has had to lead him through that shadow of death, the one person he has trusted, the person who is supposed to lead him back to what has been so long and lost. And that, somehow, is her.

Lucy is shaken. Staggered, almost. She doesn’t know what to do with such depths of trust and belief, even as twisted and badly expressed as it has been, and understands slightly better how terrible such a loss must be, if he thought that she had forsaken him. Emma’s voice echoes mockingly in her head. _Reads your stupid journal all the time. Thought you could do anything. So this is going to really sting, won’t it?_

They sit there, still looking at each other. He appears to be waiting for her to say something, fire back, to shout some more. They fight well, they always have. Especially since, for whatever confounded reason, even when it would make more sense – and perhaps this is it, this is the reason – she has never been afraid of him.

Lucy considers it, to be sure. It’s enjoyable. Comforting. Safe. But for all that, it is so very not what she wants to do right now.

Instead, she leans forward and kisses him.

Flynn’s breath catches in shock. Their kisses before have been of the hungry, possessive, taunting, testing variety, one of them or the other pushing each other’s limits, usually a prelude to a hot and hard fuck against the nearest wall; the closest they ever got to a bed was the one she chained him to in 1787, and there was that chaise they nearly broke in 1912, but otherwise, tenderness has not been much of a feature. Lucy cups his face in her hands, turning his head slightly, opening his mouth with her own, able to actually enjoy it for the first time, rather than burning through it to another unsettled parting and lingering haunting. He makes a move to raise his hand, and grunts in pain as his bad shoulder catches. He tries it with the other hand instead, knotting it in the loosened hair at the back of her neck, pressing her into him. There is a vast, unspeakable hunger in him, a need to be touched gently, to be seen, to be wanted. _No man is an island,_ Lucy thinks. But God, but _God,_ Garcia Flynn has been living on one for as long as he humanely can, and chasing away anyone who tries to swim out.

She shifts forward onto his lap, trying not to jostle his side, as he scoots back on the bed to give her better purchase, as her knees slide to either side of his hips. He is a very good kisser, especially when he’s not actually trying to tear her face off, when the rage that burns permanently in his depths seems to have been, at least for the moment, banked. His mouth is warm and wide and generous, and Lucy utters a small sound into it as she grips his hair, her lips brushing over the fine-cut corner of his, his nose, the rough scratch of his jaw, the underside of his chin. His good hand rests low on her back, pulling her solidly against him. His shoulder is starting to bleed again, but he also doesn’t appear to care.

Finally, Lucy pulls back, flushed and breathless, hands trembling as she reaches for the rags, wets them again, and begins to fashion a makeshift bandage. She really doesn’t feel up to trying stitches; she’ll ask Wyatt later. How long will he be out, anyway? It would be awkward for him to walk in on them again, though if he doesn’t have any good news about the Lifeboat, it won’t matter. Lucy feels obliquely ashamed, but not entirely enough to avoid the risk altogether.

Flynn’s dark eyes flick to her. Lucy can feel him trying a little too hard to be nonchalant about the way her arms are almost around him as she ties the bandage into place. Then abruptly he says, “Rittenhouse. John Rittenhouse. Did he hurt you?”

“I think I hurt him more, actually.” Lucy concentrates on the knot; the wet rags are slippery. “I hit him over the head with a candelabra.”

Flynn grunts a surprised laugh, then grimaces. “Ah,” he says, half to himself. “That’s my girl.”

Lucy has to swallow an unexpected warmth in her stomach, as her cheeks heat faintly pink. She’s almost tempted to tell him about the Rittenhouse thugs throwing her into the root cellar overnight, see if his outrage extends to hearing about her being mistreated, but she also doesn’t want to prod or grub for his sympathy, and her fear, her struggle, is more important than being a prop for whatever wrong conclusion he would draw from it. Besides, the last thing she needs is to give him another reason to try to bust out of here and try to take down John with his bare hands. She pulls the bandage tight over his shoulder, and can’t resist smoothing her own hands across the strong planes of his bare chest. Their eyes lock. It’s not only him short of breath.

Slowly, deliberately, Lucy slides forward on his lap, straddling him, until his back is against the wall and she is fully on the bed. Their foreheads touch, breath hot on each other’s cheeks, his nose against the side of hers, as he brushes the back of his fingers on the side of her neck, with a gentleness and hesitance he has rarely shown with her. Their couplings have been rough, insistent, hard and heavy – perhaps because both of them know that the other is strong enough to withstand it, and perhaps because, until now, tenderness is the last thing they have wanted or expected from each other. Sex is understandable, defensible. Intimacy, less so.

Lucy traces a finger over Flynn’s bottom lip, as he sucks lightly on it, and she leans closer, breath catching in her throat as she hitches herself up against him. She puts one hand on his shoulder, then caresses from his collarbone down his stomach, sliding under the waistband of his trousers. He shifts with another muffled grunt, holding her back, as he doesn’t do well with not being in control of things, of thinking he’s lost focus on the mission even for a moment. But she gives him a look, reminding him that if he wants this, if he wants her, he plays by her rules right now.

After a moment, he shifts again, granting silent permission, and her fingers continue their downward course. Both of them gulp, mouths open, as she touches him, cupping his smooth hardness in her palm, stroking and circling. He thrusts up into her grip, swears under his breath as this is evidently uncomfortable for his multiple bullet wounds, and then decides to fuck with it, literally. Lucy can’t help grinning into his cheek, keeping a light touch on him, enjoying the weight of him, the solidness. When he seems rather short of breath, she kisses him on the underside of his jaw, nips at his pulse point, and slides slowly down him, as he looks startled. Moves to shift his trousers down off his hips, brushes her lips along solar plexus to stomach, then lower. Noses at the cut of his groin, and then takes him in her mouth.

Garcia Flynn seems to stop breathing altogether, staring down at her like a man in a dream, as Lucy licks lightly at the tip, then moves deliberately up the shaft, sucking slowly and thoroughly. He reaches out as if to grasp her hair, stops himself, takes a fistful of the bedclothes instead, and braces himself, almost afraid to move if it would stop this, if she might come to her senses. He looks down to watch her head rising and falling on him, this woman, this angel, reaching him in the uttermost depths of darkness. _If I ascend to heaven,_ Lucy thinks, remaining intent on her work, _if I make my bed in the reaches of hell._ _If I take the wings of the dawn, if I dwell in the remotest part of the sea._

Flynn groans, bucking up into her, as she reaches out to take hold of his hips, pushing him back down, intensifying the pace of her slow and deliberate fucking with lips and tongue and teeth and breath, taking her sweet time about it. He almost whines, if it’s possible to imagine him making such a sound. Lucy doesn’t relent, finds herself enjoying the control, the power almost as much as the action itself, the way it feels to have a man like this – _this_ man – completely at her mercy. She takes him briefly, wetly almost to the hilt, sucks fiercely, and drags her lips back down, curling her tongue and flicking him. He whispers something that sounds half like a prayer.

Lucy pulls back, shifts onto her knees, and turns around, beckoning for him to unbutton the back of her dress. He does, though it takes slightly longer than usual with one good hand, and she lets it slide off her shoulders, revealing her corset beneath. She wraps her hands around his head, pulling him toward her as he presses kisses into her cleavage, worshiping at breasts and shoulders and collarbone and throat, having clearly had enough of letting her have the upper hand. Swings her around beneath him, grimacing as blood shows on his bandages, and they stop kissing frenziedly long enough for Lucy to whisper, “Your shoulder – we shouldn’t – ”

“Shut up,” Flynn says into her mouth, getting a hand between her legs (hopefully his good one, but she’s not sure he’d notice at this point if it wasn’t) and both of them gasping as he finds her wetness, teasing at her with a thumb but not quite slipping into her. He toys at her clit, then all at once, enters her with two fingers, building a gentle but relentless rhythm as she arches her hips, desperate for the friction as he rubs and rouses her. He moves faster, and it’s her turn to whine, pulling at him, starving for his mouth, but he won’t let her kiss him. “My rules now, Lucy.”

“You’re a bastard,” Lucy manages, conscious of how true this is in just about any aspect of Garcia Flynn’s life, but especially this one. She jerks at him, well aware that this is payback, as he shifts his weight, braces himself on one arm, and slides his hand out of her. Then he rucks up her skirts around her knees, glances at her, and when she gives him a breathless little nod, plunges into her hard and fast.

Lucy practically sees stars. Oh god, oh _god,_ it feels so good that her entire body clenches around him. Normally this is the part where they commence on their hot and mindless rush to release, but he doesn’t move right away. Seems to be taking it in, considering it, remembering it, before he finally starts with lighter, shallower thrusts. Her head tips back, hair spilling in shining dark locks over the white pillow, his knee riding along her hip as he changes the angle. She clutches at him, wanting, wanton. Can feel the strain and strength of his strokes, the rasping against her, the hunger. She is ascending, unmade.

After everything, it doesn’t take long for either of them, and he pulls her half upright as he rides one final, heavy thrust into her, both of them gasping and heaving, and shuddering and burning and blazing in the heat of climax. They fall back entangled into the bedclothes. The bandage on his shoulder is half off. He really might accidentally kill himself one of these days. And yet perhaps if he died like this, he might not even care.

By the time Wyatt returns later that evening, they are both dressed and sitting carefully apart and not sure how to talk, or if they should. Lucy can sense that things aren’t entirely mended between them, and won’t be as long as the questions of Iris and the Mothership remain outstanding. Flynn isn’t outright furious at her anymore, at least, but what was said earlier, what Lucy realized, about the weight of what he has given her, what she’s broken, intentionally or otherwise – that isn’t something that is mended in a day, hot sex or otherwise. She could still lose him from here, she thinks. Easily. Perhaps even more easily than before, as if the knives have become sharper, the fall more perilous. She isn’t sure what she feels about that, other than that it terrifies her.

“Well?” Flynn says grumpily, when Wyatt doesn’t speak immediately. “Are you going to give me my gun back now, so I can go take care of the bastards?”

“Yeah,” Wyatt says. “I’m not so sure that would work out for you.”

Flynn gives him an even blacker look. “I’m happy to be wrong if it doesn’t.”

“No. I’m pretty sure it wouldn’t.” Wyatt runs a hand through his hair. “I don’t even know what’s going on, but it’s major. They weren’t kidding about this being some kind of meeting. Look, man. Even you and I together with both our guns wouldn’t stand a chance. And…” His eyes flick to Lucy. “I’m not sure that’s a wise idea anyway.”

Flynn frowns. “What are you talking about?”

Wyatt takes a deep breath. “Remember how we got to 2017,” he says, determinedly offhand, “and discovered that the reason Lucy doesn’t exist in the present was because her mom’s side of the family had somehow vanished?”

Lucy and Flynn glance at each other. This is news to her, but apparently not to him, as he pauses, then says, “Yes?”

“Yeah. Well. The name of the woman leading this… thing? Major Rittenhouse hootenanny?” Wyatt’s jaw tightens. He looks at Lucy again, as if he really wants to spare her from this, but can’t think how to do so. “I didn’t see her, but I heard her name. It’s Carol. Carol Preston.”


	7. Chapter 7

**XI.**

There is a long and horrible silence. Then Lucy says, “What? _Carol?_ Carol _Preston?_ As in, my _mom_ Carol?”

“I have no idea.” Wyatt blows out a breath, looking hounded. “I mean, considering we still don’t know what happened in the present, it could just be some kind of weird coincidence. Why would your mom be here, _and_ in charge of the Rittenhouse meeting? It would mean – ”

He stops. It occurs to him that he might not want to spell out exactly what this means, with Lucy looking stricken and Flynn looking murderous (so, Wyatt thinks, how Flynn usually looks). Still, though, the question cannot be ignored, especially given that Rittenhouse has a time machine that would theoretically allow them to bring anyone they damn well pleased to their evil pow-wow. Wyatt wants to say that it’s possible he misheard, just to spare Lucy’s feelings, but he knows he didn’t. Jesus, is _this_ why Lucy doesn’t exist in the future, why her mom’s side of the family seemed to have mysteriously vanished? Because Emma dropped in with the Mothership, picked Carol up as a young woman before she had Lucy, and then took her – wherever? That can’t be all of it, though, since they discovered that Lucy had been erased in the present before Rittenhouse got the Mothership. Unless it doesn’t matter, because it still would have already happened by 2017, hence it would affect her anyway? Either way, Carol’s apparent presence here is significant, but there’s no way to know if it’s the only factor in Lucy’s corresponding absence there. _Fuck_. Wyatt hates these sort of mind-bending time-travel problems with an almighty passion. _Why_ isn’t Rufus here?

Right. Because he too is back in 2017, and because Wyatt hasn’t been able to get the goddamn Lifeboat back online, or make contact with him, or send any kind of emergency signal through time at all. So all of this might just be an academic problem anyway.

“My mother isn’t Rittenhouse,” Lucy says at last. “That was my biological father. Cahill – Benjamin Cahill. So the timeline really _has_ gotten out of whack if it’s ended up thinking that she’s supposed to be here. This is a mistake.” She looks appealingly at Wyatt and Flynn, clearly asking them to support her, tell her that she’s right. Begging, almost. “It’s another of the warped side effects we have to sort out. She wouldn’t be here voluntarily.”

“I’m sure it is, Lucy,” Wyatt says gently. “We’ll fix it.”

“Or it’s not a mistake,” Flynn puts in, less gently. “How do you _accidentally_ become an important member of Rittenhouse, even in an alternate timeline?”

Lucy flinches, and Wyatt glares at him. “I don’t know, aren’t you the expert on that?”

“This time, for once, it’s not my fault.” Flynn tips his head at Lucy. “She has quite some story to tell you about John Rittenhouse and everything that’s happened since we went back to the present. Besides, if anyone, we’re getting my daughter back first, as we know _she_ isn’t with them by choice. If Carol Preston is – ”

Lucy’s cheeks are hot. “My mother,” she says vehemently, _“is not in Rittenhouse!_ She doesn’t know anything about this! This is an _accident!”_

Flynn remains unyielding, arms crossed. “We don’t know that.”

Lucy’s look at him is angry and hurt and guilty all at once. “Are you punishing me?” she asks quietly. “For letting them get Iris? Is that what this is, Flynn?”

Wyatt looks at the ceiling and suddenly wishes very hard that he wasn’t here.

“Believe me, Lucy.” Flynn’s mouth twists in a sardonic smile. “If we don’t get Iris back, your mother will be the least of our worries. But right now, no. I don’t necessarily agree that this is some unforeseen consequence or accidental outcome. If your mother’s here, she’s meant to be.”

Lucy’s cheeks go from red to white. “So you _are_ punishing me.”

“Or your mother’s in Rittenhouse.” Flynn shrugs. “One of the two.”

Lucy looks as if she’s going to smack him, which Wyatt certainly isn’t going to break his back trying to stop. Instead she clenches her fist and whirls on him instead. “Look, I know my mother didn’t tell me who my dad was, but. . . Henry Wallace raised me as his own anyway, we were a family, I can understand why she might want to keep the whole fling with Benjamin Cahill under the table. But if she’s – ” It’s clear that the full and horrible implications of what this might mean are starting to form in Lucy’s head, despite her best efforts to ward it off, and she would give anything for it not to. “If she _is,_ then. . . she would have been lying to me. My whole life. About everything. Would have known all along what I’ve been doing and what I’ve been up against. Does she – has she remembered Amy this whole time? Has she – has she _known_ she was missing, but didn’t care? Because in this timeline she’s healthy, she has her own life back, even if her _daughter_ is missing? How could she – how could. How could she be so. So _selfish.”_

Lucy almost hisses the last word, bristling like an angry cat, eyes burning feverishly bright. Wyatt reaches out to touch her, but she snatches her arm away, wrapping into herself, and she certainly isn’t about to look to Flynn for comfort, as he is sitting there with an expression half mildly pained, half arrogant _I-told-you-so._ It’s clear that he doesn’t like seeing her suffer, but he’s also not going to stop or try to shield her in any way from the realization, such as Wyatt’s first impulse is. His bedside manner is really, to say the least, completely abysmal. And the guy was supposedly _married_ once. How the hell did that even work?

The silence is hideous and eternal. Lucy presses a hand to her mouth, turning away as if she is about to be sick. Wyatt and Flynn exchange half a look, until Wyatt steps after her and puts a hand on her elbow. At that, Lucy cracks, whirling around and throwing herself into his arms. She holds onto him tightly as Wyatt rests his chin on her hair, exquisitely conscious of Flynn’s dark gaze boring through both of them and unable to repress his usual exasperation with the stupid ass: if Flynn could get over his damn Rittenhouse neurosis for once, and his impulse toward vengeance on Lucy for Iris, Wyatt wouldn’t _need_ to be the one doing this. He’s seen flashes of the other man’s complexity and vulnerability, even more than he wants to at times, but he still has been unable to rid himself of the conviction that Garcia Flynn’s appearance, character, and general outlook on life would be vastly improved by the vigorous application of a brick to the head, repeatedly.

After a moment, Lucy gets hold of herself, biting her lip and pulling away. She looks up into Wyatt’s face, but doesn’t ask about the Lifeboat; she seems to sense that if the news on that front was good, he would have told them by now. She sniffs hard and squares her shoulders. This is the Lucy capable of putting aside personal trial and loss, even crushing ones, in the face of the larger goal – and one which, Wyatt thinks, he and Flynn have both consistently failed at, with their obsession with returning their dead wives to life. Lucy has lost her sister, and she wants her back more than anything, but she’s never taken a moment to be selfish about it, to forget what’s at stake. It’s not surprising that she’s stronger than either of them, and again without meaning to, Wyatt and Flynn exchange half a shamefaced look. Then Lucy says, “You – Wyatt, can you sew him up, please? I did what I could for the wounds, but they still need to be properly closed.”

Wyatt, for once, does as asked without any (or at least many) judgmental glances in Flynn’s direction. He goes downstairs to wash his hands, threads the needle, and pulls the chair up, as Flynn presents his shoulder with an only slightly evil look. Lucy excuses herself, apparently wanting a moment alone to gather her thoughts, and Wyatt works steadily. It’s no different from patching up any other comrade in the line of duty – comforting, almost. He barely even remembers to jab Flynn too hard with the needle. The man does know how to take a punch – or a shot, rather. Like any other soldier, this is far from the first time.

Wyatt can sense Flynn watching him as he stitches, though neither of them seem to want to be the first one to break the silence. Then Flynn says abruptly, “I fucked it up, didn’t I? Earlier.”

“Yeah.” Wyatt could be a lot more blunt about this, but for once, he chooses not to be. “Yeah, I’d say you did.”

Flynn grimaces, with that usual bitter half-smirk he wears, staring off into the distance. “But if her mother _is_ Rittenhouse – ”

“Look. I know this is hard for you to get, but not _everything_ is about Rittenhouse and who is or not in it, all right? Lucy’s already reeling from her biological father turning out to be their creep-in-chief, or whatever he is. Her sister’s missing. She doesn’t exist in the present and we still can’t be sure why. She feels completely terrible about losing your daughter – who no one ever asked her to care for, by the way. She took that on herself. We have no real idea how to boot up the Lifeboat or get home. And now her _mother_ might be Rittenhouse too, everything in her life is a lie, and the person who should have loved and protected her the most is possibly the biggest culprit? Anyone any less strong than Lucy would be a gibbering wreck on the floor. I don’t pretend to understand what it is with you two. You can probably guess how I feel. But if you actually care for her at all, and not just for whatever you think you’re getting from her, then yeah. Fucked up is one word for what you did back there.” Wyatt draws the thread straight, loops one more stitch through the bruised flesh, and knots it off. “If you can stand hearing it from me.”

Flynn grimaces again. “You’re not wrong, cowboy.” He pauses. “Wyatt.”

“Thanks, terrorist. I mean, Flynn.” Wyatt cuts off the thread, gets another, dips the needle in the medicine solution, and starts in on his side wound. “It looks as if you opened these again after the bleeding stopped the first time. What were you doing?”

Flynn raises an eyebrow. “You want to know?”

“No, on second thought, I don’t.” Wyatt concentrates rather harder than he needs to on drawing the tattered edges of flesh together. “You’re a piece of work, you know that?”

“So I’ve been told.” There is, obnoxiously, a faint edge of self-satisfaction in Flynn’s voice, until Wyatt has to remind himself that it would be counterproductive to punch him just now, when they’re finally getting along. If you squint, at least. “You sure you don’t want to – ”

“Yeah. I’m sure.” Wyatt gives Flynn a look to remind him that he is holding a sharp and pointy bit of metal and is happy to prove it. He finishes the stitches, does up clean bandages for each wound, and sits back. “Try not to get yourself shot again, and any plunges into, I don’t know, an open sewer should definitely be avoided. But yeah, you’ll live.”

“Try not to sound so disappointed.” Flynn sits back and looks around the room in search of anything alcoholic that is not the medicine. “I could really use a stiff drink.”

“I could use something too,” Wyatt admits. “I’ll go downstairs and look.”

This he does, managing to purchase three whiskeys from the bartender; the city is still in a good mood from the inauguration, the booze is flowing freely, and he carries them back up the stairs. When he steps back into the room, Lucy has returned, with her eyes only slightly red. She takes the whiskey from him with a murmured thanks, as Wyatt hands one over to Flynn and keeps the last for himself. They raise the glasses in a silent, ironic toast, then drink.

Wyatt’s eyes water as the full impact hits like a fireball; ye olde nineteenth-century moonshine is not pulling its punches, and he is not a novice at this kind of thing either. Flynn, damn him, manages to keep a straight face, though Lucy coughs. When they have all fought down the jet fuel successfully, Wyatt wipes his mouth and manages, “I think Flynn had something to say to you, Lucy.”

Flynn looks startled. He clearly had no idea that he had anything whatsoever to say.

Wyatt clears his throat, and not just from the drink. “Yeah, Flynn. Didn’t you?”

At that, belatedly, the dense motherfucker cottons on. _Finally._ “Actually. He’s. . . right. I’m. . .” It clearly takes a lot, as this man has rarely condescended to humiliate himself or step down or admit error or uncertainty in his life. “For earlier. What I said about your mother, and all that. I’m sorry, Lucy. I. . . could have gone about it better.”

Wyatt clears his throat again.

“A lot,” Flynn says. “A lot better.”

Lucy bites her lip, looking down at her mostly empty glass. “All right,” she says quietly. “Thank you for saying that. I suppose we do have to find out what the truth is, either way.” She looks at Wyatt. “What you said, about the Rittenhouse meeting. Is it happening tonight?”

“No. Tomorrow. First day of Jackson’s administration. I guess they get together for their douche tea party and start plotting out their evil plots and scheming their evil schemes.” Wyatt throws back the rest of his drink, managing not to flinch this time. “If he’s the one responsible for the Trail of Tears, I’m sure they have plenty more equally wonderful things they want him to sign off on.”

“Yes,” Flynn says coolly. “Because he’s Rittenhouse. Quincy Adams wasn’t. They’re very much looking forward to controlling the top dog again.”

“There’s no way Trump isn’t,” Wyatt says. “Can’t we erase him and do _everyone_ a favor?”

For a moment, he thinks Flynn might actually laugh, but heaven forbid the Slavic Terminator (Eastern European Eliminator?) do that. Instead he just snorts, likewise polishing off the rest of his drink. “Where’s this meeting happening?”

Wyatt narrows his eyes at him. “If I tell you, what are you planning to do?”

Flynn shrugs. This is apparently blindingly self-explanatory. “Kill them?”

“You can’t barge in and kill the entire cabinet of the United States and Andrew Jackson and – ” Wyatt groans. “Yeah. Forgot who I was talking to.”

“My mother is in there.” Lucy looks up, lips white. “You have to let me talk to her. You have to let me find out what’s going on. If it _is_ an accident, we can get her out, take her home with us. If we do, I should return to existence automatically, since she’ll once more exist when she was supposed to in the timeline. If it’s not. . .” She trails off, plainly not wanting to finish that thought. “Never mind.”

Flynn eyes her. It’s clear even to him that he would lose whatever modicum of good standing he has recently regained, if he then immediately suggested killing her mother. It’s less clear, however, that he isn’t at least _considering_ it. Wyatt doesn’t _think_ Flynn will go through with it, even if Carol Preston does prove to be Rittenhouse – but he can’t be sure. If Lucy’s mother has been lying and controlling and misleading her this whole time, Wyatt himself doesn’t know what he’d do, if he had Carol at his mercy, for hurting her so badly. But if he does try to make her pay the ultimate price for her treachery and deception, Lucy will never exist at all, anywhere. Might just blow out like a candle altogether. Talk about cutting off your nose to spite your face.

“We’ll think about it in the morning,” Wyatt says at last, wearily. “I’ve got a feeling the day starts pretty early around here. And we’ve all had, to say the least, the hell of one already.”

This is more or less agreed to, though he’s not sure Flynn isn’t going to try to slip out at the crack of dawn, to make sure he doesn’t miss anything. But everyone is starting to fade badly, yawning and exhausted. There is a davenport and a bed in the room, and without anyone saying so aloud, it quickly becomes clear to Wyatt that he is sleeping on the former, and Lucy and Flynn are sleeping together in the latter.  He does his best to swallow his pride and accept this circumstance, seeing as he just opened his fat mouth and encouraged them to reconcile, but it still stings as he watches Lucy hold up her hair for Flynn to unlace her corset. It’s an oddly tender and domestic sort of thing, Flynn’s face intent and almost gentle as he undoes the laces, and for a moment, Wyatt gets how it worked, when he was married. As if Flynn might innately be a stubborn, arrogant jackass, but not evil. Not cruel. That, the mercilessness, the rage, the murder, while it might all be present, isn’t how he prefers to live, or something he enjoys. Just that he’s stoked it so far that it’s the only thing left to burn.

Wyatt rolls himself up in a blanket and makes himself as comfortable as he can on the narrow, creaky davenport. Supposes that if they can’t make contact with Rufus or get the Lifeboat back online, he’s going to have a lot more nights like these. Thinks he’ll stay awake, that it might get too long or too hard to bear, but instead, the instant he closes his weary eyes, he’s gone.

* * *

Lucy doesn’t sleep.

She lies awake on the sagging but comfortable mattress, the quilts pulled up around her shoulders, Flynn’s large frame engulfing her smaller one, and can’t compartmentalize enough to turn off her brain. It’s always a difficulty, as she’s the kind of person who tends to lie awake reviewing the work she’s done, the work she needs to do, her current worries, and everything she did wrong ten years ago, but this is worse. How do you just – turn this off and go off to dreamland? She’s still convinced that it’s a mistake or a timeline twist or some inadvertent or horrible attempt by Rittenhouse to blackmail her. Her mom – her _mom._ The pioneering history and women’s studies professor at Stanford, the person Lucy always wanted to be the most like. The day she heard the words “terminal lung cancer” was among the worst of her life. Her shock and euphoria on walking back in after the _Hindenburg_ and seeing Carol alive and well, before the horrible realization about Amy set in. She – this – it can’t. It can’t all be a lie. This is an accident. Her mother doesn’t remember Amy. That is the only thing Lucy can handle believing. Otherwise, it is horrible beyond all and any imagination.

Her shoulders shake, despite herself. She’s been strong, all this time. And yet all she gets are these few hours in the darkness, before she has to get up tomorrow, find her mother in God damn fucking 1829, see if Carol even remembers her, or if she’s going to have to face the reality Flynn suggested so untactfully: that her mother is Rittenhouse. If so –

Lucy doesn’t know. Doesn’t know how to even remotely deal with the situation. Her body crunches with a spasm. She chokes back a sob, stuffing her fist into her mouth, so as not to wake Wyatt and Flynn. A voice in her head remarks wryly that now of all times she should get to be selfish, but she’s still so naturally unable to do it. The only thing stopping her from coming completely unglued is that she’s not sure even she can drag herself together again if she does.

It’s then that Flynn shifts against her back. She thinks he’s just changing position in his sleep, but his arm comes down to rest on her hip, and his hand settles lightly on her stomach. It’s not until his fingers start tracing patterns against her skin, his mouth moving to brush a faint kiss against her neck, that she realizes he’s awake, and has been listening to her. Inadvertently she presses back against him, wanting his weight and warmth and size and solidness to shield her, to keep some of the world out. Maybe this is an elaboration on the apology from earlier, as if he knows he still has more making up to do, and has chosen this as the best avenue to do so. His fingers continue to circle on her stomach, until Lucy moves her hand and presses it over his, hitching herself up against him, as his breath catches. Yes, he’s _definitely_ awake.

She takes his hand and guides it slowly lower, as it dips beneath the edge of the insubstantial shift she’s wearing as nightclothes. His callused fingers rough over the soft skin of her inner thigh, and she shivers involuntarily, as he nips at her earlobe and pulls it between his teeth, hot mouth brushing at the underside of her jaw. Their eyes – hers, at least, she can’t see his face – remain closed, half dreaming. His hand skims up the top of her leg and then, as she moves it again, between them.

Lucy bites a gasp as Flynn’s fingers brush across her mound, then split her deliberately, sliding through her silky-wet folds. She presses his hand against her, thrusting, as he moves his other arm to wrap around her, holding her still. His fingers are deliberate and unhurried about their work, playing her clit first, then stroking lower, almost inside her but not quite. She shivers with delicious frisson, bucking back against him with a soft murmur, as he kisses the side of her mouth. Whispers something she doesn’t quite understand, but she gets the meaning. _Shh._

She relaxes then, somewhat, as he continues to touch and stroke her, softening and sweetening her, until at last he enters her with a finger, sliding up to the fork of his hand. Once she’s taken that, he adds a second, thumb attending her clit again, working her deep and slow. Her legs sprawl with a rush of weak-kneed heat as she grinds herself back against his hardness; his shirt isn’t exactly comprehensive in the pajamas department either. He continues to explore her as deeply as he can, as she whimpers, pulling at him, hungry for his mouth. Even he is not quite enough of an ass to deny her, and she gets hold of his ear, shifting him around. They kiss deep and slow, wet and soft, mouths open, tongues almost tentative.

At last, he settles back behind her, and finishes his work with a few quick, thorough motions that have her twisting and gasping and clutching the sheet as she comes, seeing stars. He withdraws his slick fingers, hand still low on her belly, as she is seriously tempted to roll over, grab hold of him, and take him down, wants to feel all of him inside her. But he already broke his wounds open once today, and with the release of orgasm spreading in a dreamy soft heat through her body, she can feel sleep coming on, somehow. Wants it. Needs it, desperately.

And so, Lucy Preston settles against Garcia Flynn, and finally lets go.

* * *

They wake, as promised, early. The sun isn’t quite up as they’re getting dressed, Flynn stiff and uncomfortable now that the pain has had a whole night to set in (apparently even he is not as impervious as he likes to pretend, just mostly) and Lucy has to help him into his jacket. He takes back his gun, with a deliberate look at Wyatt, and there is really no point asking what he intends to do with it. She just hopes she can intervene before it turns totally catastrophic.

They set out as the sun is coming up. It takes Lucy a lot of talking, but she finally gets Flynn to promise that she can go in first and try to find her mother, before he blasts in great gangbusters and blows the whole thing sky-high, literally. The Rittenhouse meeting is, according to Wyatt, taking place in a handsome red-brick mansion near the White House, and carriages and carts are already wheeling through the muddy streets, splashing them, as the city wakes to go about its business. When they get in sight of the place, Lucy turns to Wyatt and Flynn. “You two stay here. You’re just, well. You’re conspicuous. There’s no way Rittenhouse won’t notice you.”

Flynn scowls. “And they won’t notice you?”

“John Rittenhouse is still hoping I’ll decide to marry him, remember? If I turn up wanting to attend the big get-together, he’d probably be thrilled.”

“And you _aren’t_ going to marry him. Or so I assume.”

Lucy gives him a cold _Really?_ look.

Flynn shrugs. It’s clear he doesn’t like this plan, nor does Wyatt, but it is also clearly the only way Lucy will get close enough to determine her mother’s status without sending up the entire hue and cry. “Shout,” Wyatt orders her. “Or break a window, or something, if you need us. Promise.”

Lucy smiles a little, despite herself, at the fact that even Wyatt is now able to refer to himself and Flynn as _us,_ that there is some kind of trust, ever so slightly, between this new threesome. It doesn’t make up for losing Rufus, and they still need to figure the whole phone-call-to-the-future thing out ASAP, but for now, she’s glad they have her back. She smiles at them. “Promise.”

With that, leaving the men looking extremely on-edge and clearly counting the minutes until her return, Lucy walks the last block by herself, turns the corner, and sees the carriages converging before the mansion, as the Rittenhouse grandees debark in morning coats and top hats, walking sticks and pinstriped trousers. She hesitates, then pins a smile on her face, picks her skirt out of the city slush, and makes her way toward them, trying to look as if she belongs. After all, she did run away from John and Emma yesterday, and try to stop Emma from stealing the Mothership. If that word has gotten around, there might be some suspicion of her loyalties.

No one, however, appears to feel that it is his place to question John Rittenhouse’s handpicked bride (and you know, Lucy thinks, that’s not creepy at _all)._ Indeed, she is bowed into the mansion by a white-gloved butler, offered a drink from a tray, and –

_Jesus Christ._

Lucy jerks, almost spilling the glass down her dress, as she looks across the way and sees – indeed – her mother, gowned in regal burgundy chiffon with mutton sleeves, hair upswept, black velvet choker around her neck, the very picture of a perfect Regency madame. Their eyes lock, and Carol Preston stares at her daughter, completely stunned. Then she sweeps forward, brushes off a servant, takes hold of Lucy’s arm, and pulls her off into the parlor, shutting the door behind them. “Lucy? Lucy!”

“Mom?” Lucy is still too stunned to fully process it. Even with Wyatt’s warning to at least remotely prepare her, seeing it – seeing her mother here, in another time, here with _Rittenhouse –_ whatever grasp she thought she had on the situation, she doesn’t. “What’s – what’s going on?” she stammers, sounding like a little girl. “How are you – how can you be here?”

“How are _you?”_ Carol takes her by the shoulders and looks her up and down. “After what happened in Maryland, I was worried!”

“After what happened in Maryland. . .?” Lucy wants to be glad to see her, wants this to go away and be an accident, but she feels as if she missed a step going downstairs. “Mom. . . we’re in 1829. In _1829._ President Andrew Jackson was inaugurated yesterday. Are we really just going to act like we met for coffee in that place we liked in Menlo Park?”

“Are we?” Carol arches a blonde eyebrow. “Honestly, honey, I think this is easier. I thought I might have to explain it all, but – ” she waves a hand. “I can see I don’t have to. You know.”

“I know?” Lucy has never felt as if she knows anything less in her life. “I’ve been _erased!_ The present – I’m not there, I don’t know what – and you’re here, you’re with _them!”_

“Don’t worry,” Carol says soothingly. “Lucy, it’s going to be all right. Everything is going to be all right. You’re here. You’ve finally come of your own free will, you’ve come to see and hear and listen, and I am so proud of you. Look at you. Look how beautiful you are. It’s almost done, everything we’ve fought for. You were the one who gave us what we needed.”

“Gave _us.”_ Forget missing a step. Lucy feels as if she has plunged through rotted ice on a mountain lake, falling and falling in the dark water, drowning. “Mom, you’re. . . you’re. . . you are. You’re Rittenhouse.”

“Of course I am.” Carol leans in and kisses her forehead. Lucy should feel comforted, reassuring, safe in the bosom of maternal warmth. She feels branded, marked, by something dark and evil. “And I’m more than that. The Prestons have always been all but second in rank to the Rittenhouses themselves. You’re practically royalty, you know. A pure-blood daughter of two of the inner-circle families. And now you’ve finally realized your destiny.”

“No.” Lucy doesn’t even know if she says it aloud or not. Her lips, her mouth, her lungs, her entire body has frozen. “Mom, no. Tell me this is a mistake. Tell me.”

“It’s not. This is the truth.” Her mother gestures at the parlor. “And just the start. Come with us, Lucy. There’s so much more for you here, your talents. And besides, it’s time to see your little friend again. You miss her, don’t you?”

“Fr. . .” Lucy shakes her head like a stunned ox. “Friend?”

Carol Preston crosses the parlor and opens the door to let in a tall, graceful, dark-haired young woman. She looks oddly and horribly familiar, in a way Lucy can’t place. She’s wearing a striped faille gown with lacy sleeves, a pinned broad-brimmed hat, a fresh and lovely demoiselle of about twenty-three. She gives Lucy a demure smile. “So then. It’s true.”

Lucy goggles at her. Opens her mouth to ask. And then, horribly, it hits.

She left 1814 – fifteen years ago – a few days ago. Now it’s 1829.

Iris Flynn has grown up from the age of eight in their “care,” since the day Lucy lost her at John’s mansion. The perfect hostage, the perfect mark, to shape and train and blackmail, for the ultimate and inevitable mission, the sweetest and most diabolical revenge imaginable, for the man who has tried so hard to take them down.

Iris Flynn is Rittenhouse.

Iris Flynn is here to kill her father.


	8. Chapter 8

**xii.**

“I think it’s been too long,” Wyatt says tersely, shifting his weight and looking up the road. “If she was just scoping things out, she should be back by now. Something’s wrong.”

It’s clear that Flynn isn’t going to need much convincing on this front, as his gaze has been fixed on the mansion like a heat-seeking missile for at least the past ten minutes. It’s only the presence of Lucy amongst their nefarious midst that has prevented him from plunging in and fucking up all the available percentage of Rittenhouse’s shit and then some, but it’s also clear that this isn’t going to constrain him for much longer. “I told her. Her mother’s one of them.”

“How would you even know that?” Wyatt says, but clearly more as an old reflex, his general impulse to fight with Flynn, rather than actual disagreement. His brow is creased. Neither of them are doing well with the idea of leaving Lucy by herself much longer, even if they’ll be in much more danger there than she will. “It could still be an accident. Somehow.”

Flynn makes a scathing noise in his throat. When it comes to those bastards, he does not believe in accidents.

Both of them manage to wait about thirty more seconds before Wyatt loses all ability or pretense of chill whatsoever. “Right. I’m going in. You with me or what?”

He figures he doesn’t actually have to ask that question, as while Flynn still may not exactly be his sworn brother-in-arms, they are what the other has, and Lucy is something that at least they can both prioritize. Flynn beckons Wyatt with a jerk of his head, and they proceed surreptitiously up the muddy road, doing their best to look like they’re simply late for the meeting. They merge in among the continued stream of arrivals, which by now has mostly slowed to a trickle, and head up the steps, until the doorman stops them. “Names?”

“Dr. Jekyll,” Wyatt says, not missing a beat. He jerks a thumb at Flynn. “He’s Mr. Hyde.”

Flynn bores daggers into him with his stare, but this answer evidently impresses (or at least confuses) the gatekeeper sufficiently to allow them to sidle on past. They step into the foyer, glancing from side to side, wound to the point of total explosion if anyone comes out or confronts them, but all they can hear is murmurs from behind closed doors. Rittenhouse does not appear to notice that two of its mortal enemies have just strolled in, which is either a very good thing or a very bad one. Wyatt has that cold shiver on the back of his neck that every soldier remotely worth their salt has to pay attention to. That sense that something is not right, is in fact very wrong, and if you don’t figure it out fast, it might just be the last thing you’ll ever do.

He exchanges a look with Flynn, and both of them draw their guns, advancing down the hall in recon stance, toward the half-open door at the back. It looks as if it leads into a parlor or a sitting room, and there is a flicker of movement from the other side. Wyatt takes the lead, thinking of clearing supposedly derelict buildings in Afghanistan, when there were IEDs or tripwires or other traps hidden in there, after something was dangled to lure the guys in. Some of those, they recognized in time and bailed accordingly. Some of those, they didn’t.

He shakes his head, fighting away the momentary flashback, and checks that Flynn still has his back. He does, so Wyatt doesn’t see anything for it. There’s not really any point in doing this the diplomatic way, so he takes a few quick steps and kicks the door open.

Inside, three women whirl to face them. The first is definitely Lucy, which Wyatt has half a second to feel relieved about before he registers that the expression on her face is one of aghast and frozen horror, as if she would have given anything for them not to have just walked in right now, and now that they have, the actual trap is about to blow. He doesn’t know why. The second woman is a faintly familiar-looking older blonde, and the third –

She’s likewise familiar, though Wyatt has absolutely no notion why. His first impression is that she’s tall – remarkably so, at least six feet – with sleek dark hair and high cheekbones. Young, probably early twenties. Unless she’s Black Widow, she doesn’t _look_ like the most dangerous Rittenhouse operative in existence, especially in long skirts. But she’s standing with her arms folded and an exquisite eyebrow raised, a faint, mirthless smile playing at her lips. Flynn and Wyatt skid to a halt, realizing that this isn’t exactly an open-firefight situation, but not lowering their guns just in case. Lucy’s still looking at them as if this is her worst nightmare. And then, the dark-haired woman turns around and smiles.

“Well,” she says. “Hello, Daddy.”

For a long, impossible moment, these words simply hang in the air without registering, without making any sense to anyone. Then they start to percolate, and Wyatt blanches. Starts to get what he thinks she said – but it can’t be true, it can’t be possible. According to Lucy, they lost her, fifteen years ago in 1814. This can’t be – but yes – but it –

Oh, _Jesus Christ._

Wyatt’s reaction, however, is nothing compared to Flynn’s. For a brief, magical moment, the only emotion that lights his face is pure, impossible, radiant joy. He stares at her – at his daughter, grown up and strong and beautiful, given the life she never got the chance to have, to realize her full and formidable potential. All he can see is her, all he knows is that she’s alive and safe and standing in front of him, warm and real and breathing on her own. It’s probably the last thing that will pass through his mind when he dies. Inadvertently, he reaches for her. “Ir – _Iris?”_

She makes no move to take his hand. Continues to smile, but instead of soft and shy, it’s harder, colder, curdled. “Oh yes,” she says. “It’s me.”

Wyatt has a bad feeling about this. Has a _very_ bad feeling about this. As well-attested, he is not Garcia Flynn’s biggest fan, but this is about to turn too cruel too fast, and Wyatt’s not a sadist, doesn’t enjoy or feel vindicated or thrilled by watching a man be crushed to dust in front of his eyes. “Hey,” he starts. “Why don’t we just – ”

Nobody pays him any attention whatsoever. Iris and Flynn’s eyes are locked on each other. Her lips are still drawn over her teeth, but there’s nothing remotely smile-like about her expression any more. “Surprised to see me?” she goes on. “After you left me?”

Flynn’s mouth opens and shuts. Nothing comes out.

“After you _failed_ me?” Iris starts to circle him, sizing him up, as if to see once and for all that the giant in her mind is nothing more than a crumpled, shattered mortal man. “Left me behind? Betrayed my mother with _her?”_ She throws a scathing look at Lucy. “I must not have actually mattered that much to you, did I? Just as long as you could go on your mad rampage and burn down everything in your way? You failed me, Daddy. You failed me. You let the monsters come, and you stood back and let them eat me. And you know who saved me? You know who didn’t fail me? Rittenhouse. Rittenhouse saved me. I owe everything to them, and you wouldn’t even leave me that, would you? No, you still want to tear them down.”

Flynn’s face is dead white, his eyes two pitted chasms. The silence is absolutely murderous as Iris considers him, angling for her next point of attack. She’s almost leisurely about it, with that same sort of intense and calculated rage as her father, the violent and single-minded and deep-burning desire for revenge, and the knowledge of how to exact it for maximum  pain. Yeah, Wyatt thinks dazedly, she’s Flynn’s daughter, all right. She’s just like him. Except she’s on the diametrically opposite side of the conflict, standing here and pledging allegiance to the organization that destroyed their family in the first place, that Flynn has dedicated his life and then some to taking down. Wyatt’s honestly not sure how the man is still standing upright. If this was him, if he was facing Jessica stabbing him like this, twisting the knives, telling him with this cool, brutal, and uncompromising hatred how he failed her, his spine would be snapped. He’d be on his knees. He’d be on the floor. He’d be through it.

“So,” Iris says at last, when nobody else in the room moves to interrupt. There’s no way they could. “Now you get to see how this ends, Daddy. You know, of course, that we can’t permit you to continue on your destructive little odyssey. And they’re not particularly interested in keeping you in a jail cell for the rest of your life. But we _will_ do this properly – and for that matter, fittingly.” She glances sidelong at the older blonde woman. “Yes?”

“Take his gun.” The woman – Jesus, Jesus _fuck,_ is that – Jesus, it is. Carol Preston, Lucy’s mother. The one she was so grateful to have back, alive, healthy, even as it warred with her shock and disbelief over losing her sister. Wyatt looks at Lucy, and sees the same expression on her face as on Flynn’s, the same stunned, numb, disbelieving heartsickness. “Make sure he doesn’t cause any more trouble. Emma will be by soon to pick him up.”

Iris moves forward briskly, plucks the gun out of Flynn’s unresisting hand, and pulls a pair of modern handcuffs out of her silk pocket. She puts him into them, to which Flynn likewise offers no struggle. Wyatt raises his own gun convulsively – even knowing he can’t shoot her, and also can’t shoot Lucy’s mother – and Lucy screams, “DON’T!”

Wyatt jerks it down, even as Lucy’s paralysis breaks. She lurches forward, grabbing her mother’s hand. “Don’t. Mom, don’t. If you – if you loved me at all, if anything you ever told me was real, if this – ” She stops, gulping vainly for air. “Mom, please, please, don’t do this.”

Carol Preston looks at her daughter pityingly. “Lucy, honey. I’m doing this exactly because I love you. You know who this man is, what he’s done, what he’s trying to do even now. What he did to _you._ He _erased_ you.”

“He did not do that to me!” Lucy’s voice is almost a scream, fists clenching. _“Rittenhouse did it to me!_ And you – you’ve been _lying to me my entire life!”_

“I wanted you to know, when you were old enough. The same way I meant to tell you about your father. When you’d understand, when you’d be ready to join us. I am so proud of you. I always have been. But when you take your rightful place at John’s side and become the greatest and strongest of all of us, Lucy, see – ”

“No.” Lucy’s voice is a whisper, silent tears starting to track down her cheeks. “No, you can’t do this. Iris – Iris, please. Listen to me. Before, what happened, when I – ”

“If you didn’t want me to join Rittenhouse, perhaps you shouldn’t have abandoned me to them.” Iris cinches the cuffs tight and forces Flynn to his knees. It doesn’t take much forcing. “And you don’t get to tell me to do _anything,_ you know. Not after you wanted me out of the way so you could carry on your little affair with my father, without having me as a distraction and a burden. At least he meant me well, once. You never did. _Homewrecker._ ”

Lucy opens her mouth as if to gasp, but can’t even get that far, as her mother’s elegant brow furrows. “Oh dear. Lucy, is that true? Have you – well, you know. With him? That _is_ unfortunate. Not irreparable, but still unfortunate.”

Wyatt can actually feel himself about to defend Lucy’s right to sleep with Flynn if she damn well pleases, in a mark of how terribly and blackly perverse this whole situation is. Neither of them, for that matter, appear to have anything to say themselves. The ensuing silence is the most hideous, choking, clinging thing that anyone has ever heard or felt or tasted. Then the door swings open, and Emma Whitmore strides through.

Everyone snaps to attention, Wyatt snapping his gun up in something close to relief of having a target that he can actually shoot, even as he knows that if he does, all of them are dead too. Flynn jerks, as after all, Emma shot _him_ a few days ago, and she’s clearly prepared to do a lot worse. She regards Iris coolly, up and down, and raises an eyebrow. “Well,” she says. “You look different, for sure.”

“You fucking bitch.” Flynn speaks at last, in something close to an actual snarl. “You – ”

Emma grins icily. “What? Outsmarted you? Is that what’s bothering you the most? You would have killed me as soon as we were done anyway, I’m just serving you a dose of your own medicine. How many times did I manage to hit you, by the way? I thought it was at least twice. You should be looking worse. Then again, it’s going to be much more fun to kill you like this.”

“Where are you taking him?” Lucy bursts out, in wild panic. _“When?”_

“That’s not really your business, is it?” At a look from Flynn that suggests he’s thinking about getting to his feet and charging her, Emma glances at Iris, who gracefully interposes herself between them. “We have the Mothership now, after all, and we’ve put a lot of thought into selecting the most appropriate venue for his trial. We’ll be transporting the org there to watch. It’s only high-ranking Rittenhouse that get to go, and after all, you’re not, are you?”

With that, she and Iris haul Flynn to his feet, one at each elbow, as Lucy lets out a sound as if she’s been stabbed. “Stop,” she says desperately. “Stop, I’ll – I’ll – ”

“You’ll what? Join Rittenhouse? Kind of ironic, if you’re trying to save him.” Emma looks amused. “You know, Lucy, you should have lied. Told me that you were knocked up. It would have disqualified you from any chance of being John’s wife, and you would never have had to know about any of this. But, well.” She shrugs. “You’re an honest person.  It’ll get you killed one day, no doubt. Don’t make it be trying to rescue him from the fate you know he deserves. I’ll leave you to handle her, Lady Preston, should I? Iris, come on.”

With that, the two women march Flynn away, the door slamming behind them, as Lucy lets out a gut-wrenching scream and throws herself after it. Wyatt catches her, holding her as tightly as he can, knowing it’s not enough, not sure that he has ever hated anyone more than he hates Carol Preston right now, throwing her a look of complete and utter, withering scorn.  “Wow,” he says. “Lady Preston, huh? Lady Rittenhouse? Mother of the fucking _Year.”_

Carol’s lips tighten briefly, but she remains unruffled. “I certainly don’t expect you to understand having to make hard choices for your children, Mr. Logan, no. I’d be an awful mother indeed if I didn’t want this wonderful future for Lucy. Once everything’s straightened out – ”

 _“Straightened out?”_ Wyatt’s voice cracks a little himself. “Is that really what you call this? Look at her! Look at your daughter! You are _breaking her heart!”_

“As I said. Hard choices.” Carol glances at Lucy, who is shaking silently in Wyatt’s arms, and seems, for a moment, genuinely distressed. “I’m surprised you’re taking Garcia Flynn’s side in this. I wasn’t under the impression you had any particular affection for the man.”

“Yeah?” Wyatt says savagely. “You know, I think I’m discovering a bit more right now. Flynn might be a – ” he tries to think of a good synonym for _total lunatic –_ “little intense, but at least he’s not an actual monster. You people have no soul.”

“We have a larger goal, Mr. Logan. We always have.” Carol evaluates him with those cool, reserved eyes. “You know I can’t have Lucy attached to such an unsuitable man, the very one who’s been trying so hard to destroy everything we stand for. If you come around, if you join Rittenhouse, there’s a chance that we might consider _you_ an appropriate – ”

“You must really think I’m stupid, don’t you? I heard all about the plans to sell Lucy off to John Rittenhouse. And yeah. Tough choice. Join the Evil Empire or the Death Eaters first?”

“You’re wrong.” Carol shakes her head. “I just wish you could see – that you could _both_ see – the true good that Rittenhouse wants to do in the world. Of course your perspective is warped and blinded, and I take my share of responsibility for that. If I’d raised Lucy Rittenhouse from the start, we wouldn’t be having any of this problem.”

“Yeah,” Wyatt says again. “There’s a problem here, all right, and it’s definitely your fault. However, I can promise you it’s not the one you think it is.”

Carol makes a noncommittal noise, as if to say that they’ll have to agree to disagree. For a few more moments, there is no more sound except Lucy’s ragged breathing. Then she completes her brief and silent breakdown, somehow manages to find the strength to pull herself together one more time, and disentangles herself from Wyatt. Turns and regards her mother with that same chilling, depthless contempt, eyes flat and jaw set. “You don’t make any choices for me,” she says, not shouting. Not even raising her voice. Quiet and calm and utterly, unforgivingly lethal. This is the Lucy that dropped Jesse James with a single shot while the men were arguing about whether or not they could, the Lucy that, when pushed too far, might be the most dangerous of them all, simply because nobody would ever see it coming. “You don’t control my life, my future, _or_ the people I choose to love. And you _don’t_ get to dictate how I get back to any of that. I want my sister back. I don’t know whether you remembered she was gone, and honestly, I don’t want to. I’ll try to save you, to prevent things from going back to the timeline where you were dying, because you _are_ my mother. Because I owe you that, if nothing else. But that doesn’t mean that I won’t want to. That I won’t wish with my entire heart that I could, because I don’t think I can ever trust you again. That I can ever even _look_ at you again. So, Mom. I hope this was what you wanted. I hope it’s worth it, for you and your beloved Rittenhouse. Because if not, well. You’ll have paid the entire world, your entire soul, and been left with this in return.”

And with that, while Carol is blinking as if she’s just had something heavy swung into her face, Lucy whirls precisely, surgically, on her heel, and beckons to Wyatt. Holds her head high, shoulders square – _God,_ this woman, she is a force of nature, she is elemental, she is _primal_ – and doesn’t look back. Walks out of the parlor with her entire life burning down behind her, and does not shed a single tear.

* * *

“We have to,” Lucy says, still quietly, as speaking any louder feels as if it might rip open the gaping wound in her chest. “We have to save him.”

Wyatt gives her the look which says that he knows she means well, but he honestly has no idea how they’re going to pull that off. Or even if they should. There is the whole idea of not leaving a part of the team behind, but as recently as their last mission, Flynn was still their enemy, bombarding Fort McHenry and playing an indirect part, even if not the prime mover, in changing history to what they encountered the last time they were in the present. “Lucy,” he says at last, quietly. “I don’t agree with what happened, I don’t think even he deserves this, and I know we can’t just step aside and let Rittenhouse do what they want, but. . . how would we even start?”

“You heard what Emma said. They’re moving him out of 1829, they’re taking him somewhere, some _when_ else for whatever big spectacle they're setting up for his downfall. Which my mother has probably planned, in fact.” Lucy’s chest contracts again until she almost can’t breathe, fighting against an overwhelming tidal wave of despair. “She’s using the Mothership to shuttle the various Rittenhouse luminaries there to watch the show. What is it, ancient Rome? So they can throw him in the arena with some lions and have the full experience?”

“Probably.” Wyatt stares bleakly at the sky. They’ve been let go, as they’re not what Rittenhouse was after – that entire scene, that entire trap, was staged precisely to catch Flynn, and it’s worked to a nicety. Besides, Rittenhouse clearly thinks they’ll be back of their own free will soon enough, which might actually be the case. “But the Lifeboat’s dead. We can’t follow them.”

“Yeah,” Lucy says, carefully offhand. _“We_ can’t.”

Wyatt’s gaze swivels to her sharply. “Lucy – I don’t know what you just thought, but if we split up one more time – ”

“Look.” Lucy closes her eyes briefly. “We both know that if I put my mind to it, I could argue my way into a spot on the Mothership. It probably wouldn’t even be that hard. My mother is running this, John Rittenhouse thinks we’re practically engaged. I can play that. Wherever, whenever they’ve taken Flynn, I can get there too.”

“Yes, but then what?” Wyatt presses. “The two of you are going to outrun all of Rittenhouse, he’s going to agree to leave behind Iris even if she has been brainwashed to hate him, and you’ll make it to the Mothership in time to activate the remote-retrieval and signal Rufus to pull you out? You still, as far as we know, can’t go back to 2017. So are you – ”

“I don’t know. I don’t know, all right? I don’t have the full plan. I don’t have much of any plan. I just.” Lucy stops, staring down at her lap. “I can’t let him die, Wyatt. I can’t do it.”

Wyatt blows out a slow breath. “Yeah,” he says at last. “I was afraid you were going to say that.”

“It’s. . .” Lucy’s lip quivers, ever so slightly. “What Iris said, I think it – ”

“No. No, it was not your fault, okay? Listen to me.” Wyatt reaches out and grabs both her hands, making her looking at him. “It was not your fault. It wasn’t Iris’s either. She was a little girl, those bastards got hold of her, of course they managed to get her thinking and saying everything they wanted her to. What happened with you and Rittenhouse, with your mom, that isn’t your fault either. Okay, Lucy? Okay?”

Lucy takes a long, slow breath. She isn’t sure she believes it, but she appreciates him saying it. “Okay,” she echoes at last. “But I can’t leave either of them, Wyatt. I – don’t ask me to.”

Wyatt manages a faint, wry smile. “So,” he says at last. “You’re choosing, huh?”

“You and Rufus will always be the rest of me. Always.” Lucy tightens her grip on his hand. “And you need to stay here and get the Lifeboat fixed, find a way to communicate with Rufus. I’m pretty sure even Rittenhouse isn’t going to buy a convenient change of heart from you in three hours. Besides, someone has to figure out if there’s any chance of stopping whatever they did here, or if there’s any way to get history back on track. I can’t ask you to risk yourself for Flynn. I have to do this by myself.”

“Maybe,” Wyatt says. “You could ask me to risk myself for you, though.”

“I know. I do.” Lucy keeps looking at him steadily. “But I can talk myself onto the Mothership. I can’t talk you. And Flynn, whatever it is with us, I don’t know myself. But I just. . . I can’t help but think that we were always supposed to meet, somehow. God, fate, whatever. Something brought us together, led us to each other. Whatever that is, I have to see it through.”

Wyatt is quiet for a moment, as they still sit holding hands. “Okay,” he says again, at last, barely more than a whisper. “If that’s what you want, Lucy. If you really think you can, but – you know there’s a chance you can’t make it back at all. That they’ll just kill him, and you’ll be stuck as one of Rittenhouse’s creepy cult fanatics forever, wherever, _when_ ever. If you go, I just. . . I just want you to be sure that that’s something you’re willing to do. To sacrifice.”

“I know.” She does, far too well. “And I’d do the same for you, or Rufus.”

“Not quite, though,” Wyatt says, very softly. “It’s something different. With him.”

Lucy pauses. Then at last, just as softly, she nods. “Yeah,” she says. “I guess it is.”

The plan is almost simple, when it comes down to it. Wyatt stays in 1829. If he can keep trying, and get the Lifeboat somehow operational, he can install the remote-retrieval patch and be extracted to 2017 by Rufus. Lucy will go back to Rittenhouse and pretend she’s seen the light, that she’s thought it over and agreed her mother is right, that this is what she wants. Then she’ll get a seat on the Mothership to whenever they’ve taken Flynn, try to find him and Iris, and save him from whatever terrible fate Rittenhouse has in mind for him. After that is when this all turns decidedly hypothetical. _If_ they can make it to the Mothership in time, and _if_ they can trigger the override, Rufus can get them home. _If_ that matters. _If_ Lucy’s back. _If_ Flynn himself can even stand to look at her again, or agree to leave Iris, even knowing what’s become of her. It feels like every possible outcome ends with Lucy losing him somehow, and yet. No matter how utterly, cosmically impossible this appears to be, she’s simply not prepared to do that.

She and Wyatt bid a brief, understated goodbye, trying to pretend this is nothing more than an ordinary parting, checking out between missions, when both of them know that the Time Team is now officially and possibly permanently broken up, in three different years in three different centuries. There is no certainty at all of ever seeing each other again. She doesn’t know when exactly Rittenhouse has taken Flynn, but her hunch is earlier. Maybe a little earlier. Maybe a lot. They don’t really want a fair trial for him, after all. They want him to burn.

When Wyatt’s headed out for the Lifeboat, when he’s out of sight and she can’t see him at all anymore, Lucy turns back and starts toward the mansion. She’s going to need to play her role well, and there can’t be any mistakes. They’ll be plenty suspicious as it is, but if her status as apparent Rittenhouse princess is worth anything, she has to milk it for all it’s worth. All she can think of, the one thing to keep her focused, is that they’re going to pay. They’re going to pay for this, for her, for Amy, for all the lies, for Flynn, for Iris, for altering the entire fabric of history, for Wyatt, for Rufus, for everything. They’re going to pay. They’re going to pay.

She manages to make it inside again, smiling and apologizing for her earlier breakdown, asking to talk to John. She can’t face her mother, even and especially to lie that she’s come to join her, and her mother knows her too well; she has a better chance of working on John, who’s so desperate to believe her anyway. It takes a bit of persuading, but she gets an audience with him, and manages to choke down her umbrage. Smiles. Flirts a little. Brushes her fingers along his arm. Gives him the general impression that if she gets to go with him to Flynn’s trial, they can be Rittenhouse-married and Rittenhouse-boinking to get started on their Rittenhouse-babymaking, just as soon as that awful traitor is taken care of. She, of course, will choke him with a curtain tie sooner than letting any of this actually happen, but it does the job. He says she can come. He’d be honored. Since she is, after all, essentially his fiancee.

Lucy may throw up in her mouth a little at that, but manages to hide it. She waits until the door opens and Emma appears, clearly intending to pick up the Big Boss for the main ride – then stops dead at the sight of Lucy. “Well, well. What are you doing here, exactly?”

Lucy forces a twisted little smile. “I’m going with John, of course.”

“Mmm-hmm.” Emma regards her with cool suspicion. “That’s what you’re doing, is it?”

“What else would I be doing?” Lucy takes John’s arm and smiles again, with teeth. “I’m Mr. Rittenhouse’s special guest. Aren’t I?”

“Yes,” John says. “Yes, Miss Whitmore, she is. I’m happy for her to accompany me.”

Emma divides an utterly unconvinced glance between them, but she also can’t contradict her benevolent overlord to his face, even if she clearly knows what is actually going on here. With another _I’m watching you_ look at Lucy, warning her not to try anything, she sweeps a bow and leads them out to the Mothership, which she has evidently just landed on the lawn. It is supremely out of place among the staid nineteenth-century brick mansions, with its glowing blue lights and smooth white plasteel shell. Lucy wonders how much they have to pay the cops to look away in this part of town.

It appears they’re the last ones to go; everyone else has already had their ride, including her mom. It’s just the three of them leaving 1829 now, the same as they arrived here, but of course, utterly different. Lucy fumbles the seatbelt buckles as best she can, then leans back. With her best version of a winning smile, she says, “When are we going?”

“Not really something for you to worry about, is it?” Emma triggers the door latch, and it cycles shut as they prepare for the jump. “Since you’re coming as one of us?”

Lucy doesn’t want to kill anyone else. Really, she doesn’t. Once was more than enough, and it’s not something she wants to repeat. But just then, she seriously considers it.

“No,” she says instead. “Of course not.”

When the Mothership lands, the door opens, and Lucy has to allow John to help her out, a blast of sea wind hits her face, there are no lights that she can see, and a few Rittenhouse goons waiting with horses and a lantern. Her hunch about _earlier_ appears to be dead on the money, and she spends the ride trying to work out where and when on earth they are. It’s warm and sticky; it feels like summer. It’s coastline, it looks like New England, and when they reach the town, it appears to be seventeenth-century. Late, if Lucy had to guess. This is a little before her area of specialty, since she works on American history, and this is clearly still colonial, well before the Revolution. While John and Emma are climbing down and discussing something with the men, Lucy takes the opportunity to glance at a broadsheet posted on the wall of what appears to be the village inn. It’s dark, and she has to lean in close. Nonetheless, the words jump out at her.

_Their Majesties Court of Oyer and Terminer, UNDER William Stoughton, Lieutenant Governor, & Crown Attorneye Thomas Newton, does Here Convene and Provide for the Just & Regular Detection and Punishment of those Suspected of the Abominable Crime of_

_W I T C H C R A F T_

_& Other Satanick Sorceries and Devilish Evils_

_in Salem Town, Province of Massachusetts Bay  
_

_1 6 9 2_

_Anno Domini_

_In the Third Year of the Reign of Their Protestant Majesties_

_KING AND QUEENE_

_WILLIAM & MARY_

_of Great Britain, Ireland, & Etc._

Earlier. Yeah, earlier. Lucy would say so.

She thought they wanted Flynn to burn. That they didn’t want a trial, they wanted a baying mob. That there wasn’t going to be justice. Only murder.

Apparently, she was exactly right.

She jerks around as John and Emma finish their conversation, and pretends not to have noticed the bill-paper. Allows herself to be shown inside the narrow, creaking inn with them, thinking that at least the one good thing about having landed in the middle of a frothing witch hunt is that there will be no question of her and John having to share a room (though if Lucy recalls, a substantial proportion of Puritan brides were already pregnant on their wedding day, as – surprise, surprise – if you try to force everyone to live by a strictly repressed and zealous religious code, it’s going to backfire on you). She gets her own, as John insists, while Emma continues to look openly skeptical. “Sir,” she starts. “Sir, Lucy has been – with _him,_ I don’t think we can trust her by herself, I should share with her, I should keep an eye – ”

“Nonsense,” John says earnestly. “She’s not a prisoner. She chose to come with us.”

“Because she wants to rescue him!” Emma has apparently decided to throw caution to the wind. “I know you can’t see that, you actually think she likes you, but she doesn’t, she just wants to get close to Garcia Flynn and – they’re _sleeping together,_ John, she’s just using you to – ”

At that, John looks actually stunned, so that for a moment Lucy winces and thinks everything is about to blow up. But the look of anger on his face is turned on Emma, not her. “How dare you. Lucy – Lady Preston – is just as trustworthy as I am, and she will be treated that way.”

Emma flicks a glance at Lucy, as if to ask just what mad skills she has to get two men as dissimilar as Garcia Flynn and John Rittenhouse so desperately attached to her and all but eating from her hand. Lucy flashes back another demure, inscrutable smile. She’s enjoying seeing Emma be frustrated, though of course it’s also useful for her if they loosen her leash. Wherever they have stashed Flynn, she doubts it’s here, and she’s going to need to find him fast.

Further attempts from Emma to talk John around fail, and once Lucy is finally alone, she waits long enough for them to hopefully think she’s asleep, and the inn has gone more or less quiet. There are some seventeenth-century clothes laid out on the bed, which she thinks it wise to change into. In the middle of a witch hunt, the last thing an already-strange woman needs is to draw _more_ attention to herself, so Lucy strips off the nineteenth-century dress, corset, and boots and gets herself kitted out as a good Puritan housewife. As if this place wasn’t _Scarlet Letter-_ enough already. But Lucy is going to have to work with what she’s got.

She opens the window cautiously. It’s narrow, made from ashy lime-glass, and there is a drop down onto the steep timbered roof below. Lucy is not the most coordinated person in the world, and secret sneaking out is not her forte, but she manages to swing a foot over the sill, and then another. Shoots a wary glance back, but the door to the room remains closed. Then, taking a deep breath, she squeezes through and pushes off.

She has half a terrifying moment to be suspended in midair before she hits the roof with a thump, claws wildly, kicks, wonders if someone is going to get suspicious and come out to look, and clings to a fistful of splintered board, feet dangling off the edge. She grunts, swears under her breath, makes more or less sure that she’s not going to break her neck, then lets go. Another tumble, a plunge into what absolutely smells like a compost heap below, and she rolls away in the mud, breathless, dirty, and winded, but free. Then she picks herself up, looks around warily – the town watch is not going to think highly of anyone out after nightfall, and if she isn’t careful, she’ll be hauled up in front of the Court of Oyer and Terminer herself – and runs.

Salem is dark and for the most part, quiet. You wouldn’t know that it’s about to play host to one of the most infamous episodes of public mass hysteria in history, and execute twenty innocent people, fourteen of them women, by hanging – despite the popular stereotype, they don’t actually burn them at the stake. At least, this time, and at least before Rittenhouse arrived from the future to co-opt said hysteria, and use it to stage the spectacular downfall of their most dedicated enemy. They, in fact, probably _are_ going to burn him, just to finish things off with a bang. Tell the townsfolk that he is the Devil Incarnate, that he’s the reason for the outbreak of witchcraft, that they have to destroy him to save their souls. It’s not going to take much.

Lucy tries to keep her fear at bay as she searches – if they have Flynn down some dank dungeon or thief-hole, she probably won’t be able to find him in time. But at last, as she turns into the small square before the church, she sees the stocks and pillory set up in front of it, on a raised dais that still smells of sawdust. There’s someone sitting in the stocks, legs locked in place, head down, motionless. By the looks of things, people have already been busily attending to their public duty of throwing rotten food, stones, sticks, and other garbage at the offender.

 “Flynn?” Lucy whispers. Starts to run, hurrying up the steps. “Flynn!”

He doesn’t react, doesn’t even look up. There is a gash on his cheek, and between that and the two bullet wounds, he is clearly in considerable discomfort.  But he doesn’t appear to notice that either. It’s only when she kneels next to him and tries to take his face in her hands that his eyes even attempt to focus. When they do, he mostly seems confused. “Lucy.”

“Yes. It’s me. Come on, I need to find some way to get you out of these.” Lucy looks around for any helpful implement that she can use to break the stocks, if anyone has left out a hatchet for wood-chopping, that kind of thing. “The Mothership isn’t too far. If you can re-activate that retrieval program you were talking about, Rufus can get us out – or at least somewhere – and we can see if I can come back to the present, or meet up with Wyatt, or – ”

She’s babbling, anxious and on edge and too relieved to see him again, feeling it twisting in her gut, still wrapped around her heart, but he still doesn’t react. He seems, if anything, angry. “What the hell,” he says, half to himself. “What the hell are you doing here?”

“Breaking you out of jail, by the looks of things.” Lucy tries to pry at the stocks with her hands. This, of course, does not work. “Are you okay to run?”

He just keeps staring at her, dark gaze flat and empty. This is more unsettling than any rage she’s ever seen him in, anything he’s ever tried to do. This is Garcia Flynn with absolutely no fight left in him.

“Just go,” he says after a moment, apparently deciding not to bother with the question of how she got here. “Just leave me here.”

“So what?” Lucy flares back. “You’re going to give up? You’re just going to let Rittenhouse kill you? Burn you alive? You can’t let them win!”

Flynn just keeps looking at her without a word. It’s evident from his face that he’s pretty damn sure they already have.

“There’s no point,” he says at last. Again, half to himself, as if he’s not entirely sure she’s really there, and doesn’t want to be caught conversing with thin air. “There’s no point. It’s all been for nothing. Iris is right. I failed her. I failed Lorena. There’s no chance of anything. It’s all gone.”

Lucy understands this viewpoint, she does. She also slightly wants to smack him, despite his current decrepit state, because while this may all be true, it’s also true that she’s here, risking her ass to rescue him – Rittenhouse might not outright kill their precious princess/hoped-for future co-Supreme Leader, but she doesn’t think that it’s going to be grand declarations of love and insistence on preferential treatment forever, or even much longer. Emma’s clearly already more than willing to get her out of the way, since John doesn’t want to, and this is definitely going to blow things to hell, if they’re caught. She finds something that looks like a crowbar, wedges it into the stocks, and tries to get up enough leverage to budge them. Still nada.

“Stop,” Flynn says roughly. “Lucy, stop.”

“Shut up,” Lucy grunts, sitting on the crowbar in an effort to use her body weight, but five-foot-five-inch scholars are not exactly sumo wrestlers in this department. “Whatever you want to do is usually the exact wrong decision, so you can understand why I’m ignoring you.”

Flynn stares at her, so thrown that she thinks he might laugh, but his face remains too bleak for that. She shoots a look over her shoulder, fairly sure that she saw someone light a candle in a window, doing whatever the Puritan version of peering through the curtains at the neighbors is – that kind of thing probably happens a lot around here, given the, you know, witch trials. She has a feeling as well that if he put his mind to it, he would be able to bust out of these stocks, no problem. A trained and hardened secret agent like Flynn has probably been in far worse binds than rudimentary seventeenth-century wooden pieces of crap like this. But he’s also just as clearly past the point of caring. Figures he deserves whatever happens next.

As her own efforts are getting nowhere, Lucy stops. Doesn’t know what to say to make him want to fight again, when she likewise feels the same, questioning if there’s any point in continuing to resist something so strong and so evil and so determined to steamroll everything and everyone they believe in and care about. She leans forward instead, so their foreheads brush. “Come on,” she says at last, quietly. “Come on, Garcia. Let’s go home.”

She doesn’t know where that is, or how they’d get there, or if he’d want to, or any of that. But something deep and drowned in his eyes seems to surface, ever so slightly, at that. He looks at her again, as if actually registering her presence, and frowns, brow furrowing. _“Lucy?”_

“Yes,” she says tartly. “Who did you think?”

He doesn’t say what he was thinking (probably for the best), but at last, slowly, he gives the stocks an experimental shove. Takes the crowbar from her, pries hard, grunts in pain at the strain this is putting on his wounded shoulder and side, and then with a rattle and a crash, sends the top half of the bar flying. Pulls his ankles out, grimacing, rubbing them to restore circulation; his feet are bare. She helps him up, they jump down, and get set to run – and then, all at once, a torch flares in their faces, making both of them blink and cringe. Then another one, and another.

Someone pushes his way through the crowd: an unpleasant-looking fellow with a double chin and an elaborate white wig, a high clerical collar and black robes. Not that Lucy can be entirely sure, but she’s pretty sure it’s Cotton Mather – Puritan minister, intellectual architect of the witch trials, and general A-number-one dickhead – who is regarding them with hard, bitter glee. “Well, well,” he booms. “The Devil Incarnate and his concubine, the Mother of Demons, before you in the flesh, good people of Salem! Seize them. Seize them! You know what is writ in the Holy Scriptures. _Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live.”_

“Seriously?” Lucy pants. “Seriously?”

Flynn shoves her behind him, groping for the gun he doesn’t have. More torches are flooding the square from every side. If Emma decided that badgering John about her suspicions was getting nowhere, figured that Lucy was going to make an attempt to rescue Flynn, and decided to tip off the citizens’ militia instead, she –

She’s done her job pretty damn well, actually.

Lucy didn’t expect to die by being burned as a witch in 1692, obviously. No sane person would. But it also, barring a miracle, appears to be what is going to happen to her. Emma will have taken particular care with this. Made sure there’s no chance of John, or Carol, accidentally interfering. Distracted them with something, told them to stay inside, let the provincial natives roar off on their little witch hunt. Rittenhouse might not get their full spectacle, but at least they’ll ensure Flynn is dead. No way to prove that _Lucy’s_ death was anything other than a tragic accident. Regrettable, of course. But perhaps – once they think about it – for the best.

In short:

They are completely fucked.


	9. Chapter 9

**xiii.**

The Salem Town Court of Oyer and Terminer  (specially established to address the problem of rampant witchcraft, if Lucy recalls, and which will be disbanded in October over disapproval of the trials – not that that helps them at all right now) is held in a crowded, stuffy room, a row of disapproving bewigged and berobed justices seated behind an imposing mahogany table and a throng of eager citizens looking on from the stalls, tense and hungry for a conviction. The atmosphere is like nothing Lucy has remotely experienced: devouring, almost cannibalistic. These people are already convinced of their utter and satanic guilt, and they want them to suffer for it. Hanging or burning at the stake, doesn’t matter. As she and Flynn are manhandled into the docket, both in chains, Lucy tries to catch his eye, praying for one of his spectacular plans – she doesn’t _want_ him to pull out a gun and shoot the entire citizenry of Salem, but she also isn’t in a position to be terribly picky. He might be in no mood to save his own skin, but is he going to drag her down with him? Is she going to have to figure this out all herself? From her limited knowledge of the trials, the suspects often get tried and convicted within the space of a single day, and hanged not long after that. They have no time.

The presiding magistrate bangs the gavel, and the session is brought to order. They are asked to speak and confirm their names for the court, at which Flynn gives them a look of utter disdain. “Holden Caulfield,” he drawls. “Why not?”

“It says here that your Christian name is Garcia Flynn.” The magistrate’s brow furrows at such an obviously unusual and un-Puritan moniker. “Men of good character have attested as much to us. Are you denying their testimony, sir?”

“Men of good character? You mean Rittenhouse? The lot who have turned up recently and encouraged you to arrest all the slightly strange women you can find?” Flynn’s chains clink as he leans forward, and the judges tense. “And anyone else they want? No. No, those aren’t men of good character. But then, you batch of pitchfork-waving _shitheads_ wouldn’t know that, would you? How many of the women have you killed already?”

There is a communal gasp at this extremely un-Puritan language, as by the sound of things from the stalls, several upstanding members of the community have had the vapors. The magistrate clutches his gavel as if Flynn might grow wings and fly shrieking into his face on the spot. “Do you, sir, unlawfully impede the justice done by this court in the name of – ”

“Justice?” Flynn sneers. _“Justice?_ Any of you see any justice here? This is a sham, this is all a _fucking_ sham, and you are on the wrong side of history, I promise you that. Nobody’s going to thank you for bravely clearing Salem of the menace of the witches. You’ll be remembered as a bunch of superstitious, hysterical dicks who murdered innocent women for nothing, and did it all waving a Bible and calling yourselves the champions of God. No wonder you and Rittenhouse are such best buddies. They like the same kind of thing. Probably told you everything you wanted to hear, that this time they’d make it a clean sweep. Didn’t they?”

It is not possible for anyone to make any response to this, they’re so stunned. It’s also clear that to their eyes, Flynn could not be more obviously possessed by the Devil if he actually had horns and a tail. He’s not wrong, and of course everyone has dreamed about getting to tell historical morons where to stick it, but said historical morons also have the power to order them executed more or less on the spot. John Rittenhouse and Carol Preston aren’t going to be able to stop this, even if they don’t want Lucy to die. Once a mob gets rolling, you stand between it and its target at your peril, and they will lose whatever tenuous control Rittenhouse has over the trials if they interfere. If they even know. Emma has probably planned this very carefully.

In any case, Lucy has absolutely no intention of being indebted to King Rittenhouse and her pathological liar of a mother for their deliverance, and she needs to think fast. She leans forward under Flynn’s arm, shooting him a warning look. “Saltonstall,” she blurts. “Colonel Nathaniel Saltonstall. Is he here?”

The jury rustles in surprise and disquiet. “And you are?”

“Hermione Granger.” Fine, Lucy thinks, let them try to burn an actual witch.

Flynn snorts, and she shoots him another look – _Holden Caulfield_ does not have much room to critique anyone on their alibi choices. “Saltonstall,” she repeats. “He’s a justice on this court, isn’t he?”

“Col. Saltonstall served briefly among our number, yes,” the magistrate says stiffly. “But he resigned. Expressed dissatisfaction and disbelief about the legitimacy of the trials, or their necessity. As such, a decision was made that he was not suited to continue in his post.”

“The one man willing to stand up against you?” Flynn says scathingly. “No wonder.”

Lucy gives him a _Jesus-Christ-don’t-ruin-this-for-us_ look, as this is the only idea she has and if it fails, they are about to be barbecue. She has no idea how to convince them to let her talk to Saltonstall, or even what she’d say to him if they do – he had (has) a reputation as a humane, fair, and principled man, but asking him to swallow the whole _please-don’t-burn-us, we’re-from-the-future_ thing might be a bridge too far. Even trying might be the thing to convince him that maybe the witch hunters are onto something after all, and the trials get much worse. He’s the only man in Salem currently opposing them. If he gives his blessing instead. . .

That, however, is also a problem that they will have to work out once they’re so lucky as to have it. The jury is still eyeing her with deep skepticism and dislike. “Mistress Granger, how do you and Mr. Flynn know one another?”

“We’re. . .” Lucy hesitates. There is no good lie for this situation. She can’t get away with claiming they’ve never set eyes on each other in their lives, given that she was caught trying to rescue him from the stocks last night. Nobody is going to buy that they’re brother and sister, even aside from the different surnames. “He’s my. . . intended.”

Flynn shifts slightly at that, but – miraculously – does not say anything to disagree, perhaps because it’s hit him belatedly that they might need a little finesse at getting out of this. He folds his arms and rolls his eyes instead, because he can’t _not_ be a jerk in some way, until Lucy thinks it’s probably too much to ask that they let her off on the grounds that being married to this man will be enough of a punishment. But since neither of them deny it, the jury is forced to record it for posterity. “And do either of you know Col. Saltonstall personally?”

“We’ve. . . heard of him. He’ll want to speak to us. I – ” Lucy remembers just in time that the Ivy League is still a few centuries off from being co-ed, _misogyny,_ take a shot – “that is, _Flynn_ knows him from Harvard College. We’re. . . friends of the family.”

The magistrate huffs, as these are clearly in his opinion very funny friends to be having, but he can’t quite take the risk that they’re not. The Saltonstalls will go on to be a prominent family in American history: a governor of Connecticut, a captain in the Continental Navy during the Revolution, congressmen and politicians and businessmen, and Senator Leverett Saltonstall, who – keeping the family tradition of standing up alone to oppose witch hunts – was the only member of the Republican Senate leadership to first censure Joe McCarthy for the Red Scare. Lucy wonders briefly if they’re Rittenhouse, as this would be just the kind of people that they want to recruit, but she also thinks that Rittenhouse would have its work cut out for it with the Saltonstalls, who can see directly through the candied promises to the rotten core of what they’re really offering. It occurs to her to wonder if that’s exactly what they are doing here, aside from the convenient side benefit of getting rid of Flynn. Get Nathaniel Saltonstall to capitulate, put aside his principles, condone the witch trials, or otherwise never establish the family legacy of defiance, and how many roads get smoothed for Rittenhouse in the future? A lot. The answer is a lot.

There is more muttering and glaring among the jury, but at last it is evidently and grudgingly decided that they cannot take the risk of hanging one of Saltonstall’s old school chums by accident. The court is sent for a recess, and a messenger dispatched to fetch the colonel, as Lucy and Flynn are allowed to retire to a small side chamber to await his arrival. Lucy hopes he doesn’t ask too many questions in advance and blow a hole in what is a flimsy ruse to start with. If he’s smart, he’ll cotton on to what they’re trying to do and pretend to know Flynn anyway, but that cannot be counted on. She shifts her weight, exhausted from the sleepless night, yawning in the summer sunlight; her wits feel muzzy and wandering. Which, given that they’re about the only thing that has a chance of saving their butts, is dangerous.

She can feel Flynn glancing at her, though he steadfastly looks away whenever she tries to catch his eye. She can’t tell if there is any guilt on his part, if he considers himself responsible for getting her into this mess when he is the only one who should have suffered for it, or he’s just angry – at her, at her mother, at all the Prestons, who are apparently positioned at the very heart of the one thing he wants to destroy more than anything else in the world. He seemed briefly willing to give it a go and escape with her last night, but that’s the thing with Flynn. You’re never sure what the fuck he’s thinking. She might just be fooling herself to think that after all this time (and all _that)_ she should have a better read on him.

At last, there’s a cursory knock on the door, and a colonial gentleman in his early fifties, who must be Saltonstall, makes his entrance, clearly more than a little baffled. His eyes flick them up and down, and it does not take long, of course, for him to realize that he does not know them from Harvard. He is, however, canny enough to catch on, and he considers them for a moment, then shuts the door behind him. “Mr. Flynn and Mistress Granger?” The tone in his voice leaves it open to question whether he thinks those are their real names. “You wished to speak with me?”

“Yes. Thank you.” Lucy manages a gracious smile. “We’re. . .we, well, have somewhat run afoul of these. . . proceedings. We were hoping you might be able to straighten things out.”

“We’ve not met, have we?” He considers her with a look that makes her think of one of her favorite professors in undergrad. Whether that’s hopeful or not, she doesn’t know. “And you both are most evidently not from Salem. How did you know to ask for me?”

“Your, ah. Your reputation, of course. Since you resigned from the court – ”

“I was not aware that that was common knowledge outside the township. It was only a span of days ago, after they hanged Bridget Bishop.” His pale blue eyes are polite, but clearly skeptical. He’s not buying this. “And while I may object to these disgraceful goings-on, I should certainly be guilty of the sin of vanity myself to think I had a chance of stopping them. Such proceedings swiftly acquire a life of their own, Mistress. . . Granger. Surely you are most aware.”

Lucy hesitates. “All right,” she says. “My name is Lucy Preston. I was brought here by the people who recently arrived, the ones who call themselves Rittenhouse. I was trying to rescue this man here, after he was arrested and put into the stocks. But matters went wrong, and we were apprehended by Cotton Mather and his. . . followers, brought here for trial in the morning.”

“I see.” Saltonstall’s voice remains noncommittal. “How, still, did you know about me?”

“I – ah, I – ”

“We’re time travelers.” Flynn, as usual, is not in the mood for bullshit, or feeble cover stories. Lucy lets out a strangled noise and elbows him in the ribs, which he ignores. “She’s a historian at a university. She knows all about you and your descendants. And I’m guessing those other visitors have been trying _very_ hard to convince you to drop your opposition to the trials, haven’t they? Whispering about some kind of grand and important future, if you join their cause?”

Saltonstall is (forgivably) floored over the first part of this statement, and Lucy spears Flynn with a look that is, she supposes, indeed rather wifely in its stern disapproval – even an intelligent and open-minded seventeenth-century man, especially one living directly in the middle of a witch hunt, is not about to blink, shrug, and go on his way with that. As usual, however, Flynn could give exactly half of a well-ripened fuck. Probably less, with the few days he’s been having. “Well?” he says grouchily, when Saltonstall doesn’t answer. “Isn’t that proof that I’m possessed by the Devil and should be executed on the spot? I don’t want you to miss your quorum here.”

Saltonstall’s mouth is still open. He shuts it. “I am unsure about demonic possession, sir,” he says – rather levelly, all things considered. “That is, however, a most remarkable statement.”

“Well?” Flynn repeats. “Your visitors. Is that what they’ve been saying or not?”

“I – yes, they have furthered propositions in that nature. They have a great deal to say about some sort of learned society they intend to found, and wish the Saltonstalls to be inaugural members. I am not terribly certain it is a wise investment.”

“It. . .” Lucy hesitates. “It’s not. A man may have approached you – his name is John Rittenhouse – and what he wants to do to America, it’s – ”

Saltonstall is puzzled. “You mean the colonies?”

“There’s going to be a war in about another hundred years,” Flynn says shortly. “You become a country. Some great-grandson of yours completely fucks up the Penobscot Expedition.”

Lucy steps very hard on his foot. The look he gives her can only be described as _bite me._ She is impressed (and slightly turned on) that he knows Commodore Dudley Saltonstall, who will indeed be dismissed in disgrace in 1779 for steering the fledgling American navy to its worst defeat until Pearl Harbor a hundred and sixty-two years later, but this is not the time. They are supposed to be _recruiting this man’s help,_ not bombarding him with unflattering facts about his family’s future (and for that matter, _telling_ him about it in the first place. That, however, is Flynn for you.)

Saltonstall opens his mouth again, decides that this is substantially beyond his pay grade in any case, and snaps it shut. “It may be prudent to make some inquiries,” he decides at last. “Until such time, I will have you removed to my home. After all, how could I refuse my hospitality to an old schooldays friend and his betrothed?”

This is clearly a bit of a pointed hint that he’s sticking his neck out for them when he doesn’t have to, and even Flynn gets it, though he glares. Then he swallows down his umbrage, nods stiffly, and takes Lucy’s arm. It takes a while to convince the jury and the disappointed spectators, but Saltonstall finally herds them out to where his carriage is waiting, which they climb into. Someone throws a rotten egg just as he shuts the door, and Lucy is reminded again of what he said. He is only one man, and these things have their own sentient, malevolent energy – this will become known as the byword for episodes of murderous public hysteria, after all. As long as they stay at his home, he himself will be in danger, accused of shielding practicing witches and/or the Devil Incarnate, and a mob might just break down the door to settle things. Getting him killed before his time would be a pretty poor way to repay the favor.

It’s a comparatively short ride through the streets to the Saltonstall residence, a handsome half-timbered, whitewashed house. They step down, Flynn giving Lucy a dutiful hand, and Saltonstall leads them inside, before nodding them up the stairs. Clearly, their presence here is to be kept quiet, and they reach a room at the end of the hall, with a door that can be barred. He says he’ll hopefully be back by evening, and that if they need anything, they can ring for the servants. He advises that it is not a good idea to go out onto the streets, and takes his leave.

When the door shuts behind him, both Flynn and Lucy blow out a slow, ragged breath, not quite daring to believe in their deliverance. The room is small but decently furnished, and Lucy sits – sinks, really – onto the bed as her legs abruptly stop working, seeing double with tiredness and wanting nothing so more as to crawl beneath the counterpane, shut the curtains, and sleep until the eighteenth century starts. Then she shakes herself, brushing her tousled hair out of her eyes. “I should – I should have a look at your gunshot wounds.”

“They’re fine, Lucy.” He doesn’t turn, still staring at the wall. “We have larger problems.”

“Yes, but that doesn’t mean I can’t check on them.” Lucy gets to her feet and crosses the floor, reaching out – only for him to catch her wrists in one hand and hold her away from him, more or less gently but extremely stubbornly. It’s clear he is decidedly not in the mood to have her fuss over him, and while being cooped up in this small room like a tiger in a cramped zoo cage is doing absolutely nothing for his temper, Flynn’s preferred method of stress relief (i.e. going out and shooting the nearest member of Rittenhouse) is, as noted, out. Guess they have to improvise.  
“Are you sure I can’t – ”

“They’re fine,” Flynn repeats again, more brusquely, in case Lucy can’t see how Fine he is here now, thanks. “And even if not, it’s no concern of yours. You shouldn’t even be here.”

“Shouldn’t be here?” Lucy’s voice rises. “Because you’re the only one who gets to crash through time trying to save your loved ones, is that it? Even when that causes all the catastrophes that we’ve been trying so hard to – ”

Flynn stares at her as if she’s suddenly sprouted a second head, which confuses Lucy briefly – at least until it strikes. She wants to bite her tongue, or take it back somehow, but she can’t, and there it is, bare between them in the unpleasant silence. Flynn looks as if he’s been brained with a skillet, and Lucy almost wants to laugh, painful as it is. Almost wants to say it again, in case both of them are clearly thinking they misheard, or misspoke. But she didn’t mean to. It just. . . slipped out. And worse, she can’t deny it. Well, then. Well.

“You. . .” Flynn speaks at last, which is a pity, because anything he has to say is not likely to improve the situation. “Lucy, you. . .”

“I made a choice to come after you.” Lucy squares her shoulders and looks at him unflinchingly, much as she has to tilt her head back to do so. “I knew what I was risking, what had a possibility to go wrong. You’ve always known what I can do, when I put my mind to it.”

For half a moment, Flynn smiles, almost tenderly. As if to say he does at that, before he remembers to disagree with her about the rest of it. “Lucy, why would you be so abysmally stupid as to put yourself into Rittenhouse’s hands, to risk that bastard John doing God knows what with you, when you could just – ”

“Could just what?” Lucy shouts, finally provoked beyond all endurance by this man, this stupid, _stupid_ man, and his award-winning obtuseness. “Just walk away? Forget about you? Pretend it didn’t matter? Pretend _you_ didn’t? Because you know what, Garcia? I didn’t!”

Flynn flinches as if he’s touched a hot stove. Stares at her wildly for a long and excruciating moment, runs a hand through his hair, whirls away, and whirls back. “You should have!” he yells back. “You should have! Then you wouldn’t be here, all of this wouldn’t – do you think I want to watch you burn for my mistakes? I’m the only one who deserves to die! Not you!”

Lucy feels briefly as if she has been punched, though she isn’t even certain why. “Well,” she says. “You don’t get to make that call. You’re so used to living completely by yourself, keeping people around only if they’re materially useful and _killing them_ when they’re not, you’ve lost track of any real or selfless or genuine human connection. You’re lonely and you’re sad and you’re broken, and you’ve gotten so used to living that way that you’ve convinced yourself it’s the only way you can, ever again. So you try as hard as you can to chase off anyone who might try to say otherwise, who might dig down into your hole and make you –”

 _“I’m not worth it!”_ Flynn spins, seizes some sort of knickknack off the sideboard, and launches it at the wall with considerable velocity, shattering it with a tinkle of breaking porcelain. It’s clearly going to be hard on the Saltonstalls’ possessions if he is allowed to be around them for much longer, and Lucy hopes the servants don’t come rushing up to investigate. “I’m not _worth_ it, Lucy! I don’t know why you keep insisting on pretending that I am! I’m not! I’m nothing like you! The world’s not flower crowns and hand-holding! Not everyone deserves to be saved. Not everyone is secretly a good person deep down. I’m not. _I don’t deserve it!”_

Lucy is momentarily staggered. But she takes another step, even as they’re almost nose to nose, neither of them backing down. “I don’t believe that,” she says fiercely. “And you’re wrong, by the way. As usual. I don’t care whether ‘everyone’ deserves it or not. We’re talking about you. You deserve to be saved. And you don’t get to tell me whether or not I make that choice.”

Flynn continues to stare at her down his long nose, completely flabbergasted. Lucy is tired of his shit, and tired of dropping anvils on his oblivious head, and tired in general, _exhausted_ , and no matter how brave a front she is putting up, she is very close to starting to cry and hiding under the quilts on the bed. Despite herself, her lip trembles. Would it kill him, would it actually, physically kill him, to _not_ be so incredibly, obnoxiously Flynn for three goddamn seconds?

His eyes flash to her face, to the shine in her eyes, the quiver in her mouth. He was doubtless about to say something else to lower the IQ of the room, but this seems to make him forget it. He takes her chin in his hand, almost timidly thumbing at the tear escaping down her cheek, and Lucy is definitely going to punch him later, as he so richly _also_ deserves, but she can’t work up the motivation right now. Instead, without a word, she all but collapses into his arms.

Flynn holds her tightly, engulfing her,  as they sway on the spot. Then he scoops her up like a feather and carries her to the bed, setting her down on it, and Lucy clutches at his grubby jacket, pulling him down beside her. He resists momentarily, one last time, and then gives in, settling next to her and pulling her into the shield of his chest. She grips his arm, burying her face into his neck, shaking on silent, half-formed sobs, as he continues to rock her clumsily. He’s muttering under his breath in what she supposes is Croatian, small nothings that sound half like endearments, if it’s possible to imagine Flynn saying such things. She doesn’t care. She just doesn’t want to get up. She wants to stay here and sleep and drown.

At last, once she settles somewhat, she thinks he’ll get up, but he doesn’t. He continues to lie there, still as a tomb-carving, and she continues to hold onto him. The world is fragmenting at the edges, turning dark and soft, and Lucy can’t resist the thrall of sleep any longer. She plunges under like someone falling through the ice, into the dark water. Down and down and down.

She opens her eyes an unknown amount of time later, feeling both as thick as a concussed ox and a bit, slightly, possibly restored. Flynn’s weight is gone from beside her, leaving the covers rumpled, but as her vision clears, she sees him sitting on the chair in the corner, staring up at the ceiling as if he’s praying. His jacket is off and he’s in his shirtsleeves, collar unbuttoned, so that it catches in her throat to see him there in the late afternoon light. He doesn’t realize she’s awake, watching him from the bed. Whatever he’s saying to God, it’s simple and silent.

After a moment, he drops his gaze, looks around, and sees her. A wry half-smile curls his lips, and he beckons to a tin plate on the desk. “There’s food.”

Lucy recognizes this as an olive branch, and nods, swinging her legs over the side of the bed and examining what is on offer. It looks like bread, a cold chicken leg, an apple, and a cup of some strong home-brewed ale, which makes her cough slightly when she drinks it. It’s good, though, weighting a small warm ember in her belly, and she feels somewhat more revived when she finishes. “Is Saltonstall back yet?”

Flynn shrugs. “Don’t think so.”

“Is there any point in reminding you to try to avoid announcing that we’re time travelers to _everyone_ we meet?”

He shrugs again. “I suppose you could remind me. Might stick one of these days.”

“You’re such an ass,” Lucy sighs, without much heat. They’re still looking at each other, the light rich and gold, and he gets up, facing her as if to say that if she wants to shout at him some more, he will obediently present himself for censure. It’s tempting, to be sure. She will likewise have to catch up these days. But what she does is cross the floorboards toward him, pause only briefly, then stand on her tiptoes, put her hand behind his head, pull him down, and kiss him.

Flynn jerks in surprise, as it was clear he was expecting a slap sooner than anything remotely like this. But he must, at last, be that bit tired of fighting too, because his hands are warm on her waist, his mouth quietly and generously giving to hers, and both of them make soft, involuntary sounds as they turn their heads and deepen it. He starts to kiss the corner of her lips, the side of her jaw, the underside of her chin, and then down her neck to her shoulder, untying the white collar of the Puritan dress she’s still wearing to get better access. He pulls at the laces of the dress itself, shrugging it down over her shoulders, and Lucy reaches up to help him. She needs this. She doesn’t even have to think twice.

Flynn buries his head into her chest, kissing and musing, and Lucy shudders as he takes a nipple delicately, toys it for a bit, then lets go, exploring lower. His hands cup and frame her waist, slide up her spine, circle her ribs, and get a good grip on her breasts, Lucy shivering again as his thumb circles the wetness left by his mouth. Then they slide back to her hips, he lifts her, and carries her back to the tousled bed, but with a clearly different intention this time. He puts her onto the quilt and crawls onto it after her, pushing her skirts up and draping her legs over his shoulders. Then, before Lucy can do much more than breathe a curse that’s half a prayer and grip his hair, he licks her, nips at her clit with just enough teeth to make her keen, and sets to his work.

Lucy wriggles and whines, trying to get one leg free to dig her heel into the bed for support, but he keeps a firm grip on her thighs, refusing to let her have any anchor apart from him. He slides his tongue inside her, tasting her, stubble rasping against her too-sensitive folds as he sets about a slow and thorough  fucking, in and out, taking his time about each lick and bite. Garcia Flynn, for better or worse, does not half-ass anything, and especially not this, stopping here and there for a proper breath but otherwise keeping up the heat and intensity of it until she almost can’t stand it, worshiping at the altar of her body. As if God may or may not answer, but now, this, here, is the only place the sinner can kneel down and know that his prayer is heard.

Lucy twists again, heat surging in her belly and up to her head, as she reaches out to grip hold of the pillow in search of some way to reassure herself that she isn’t about to tip off the wildly spinning planet and into space. With the last of her rapidly dwindling capacity for finite thought, she devoutly hopes that Saltonstall does not choose this inopportune moment to make his re-entrance, but the door remains shut. Flynn might not stop even if he did. He continues to work until Lucy is sopping wet and trembling and whimpering, desperate and hungry for the release that he won’t quite give her. Instead he withdraws, sits up, and wipes his mouth with the back of his hand, dark-eyed with lust and slow with calculated consideration. She reaches for him. “Garcia – ”

Again, he doesn’t quite let her touch him, but in a softer way, less as if he’s trying to punish her and more as if he simply wants her to stop trying so hard for once, to let him be the one to make it up to her instead. He shifts up next to her, reaching for his belt, and shrugs his trousers and briefs down over his hips – not quite all the way off, as if aware they might still be interrupted. But as Lucy spreads her legs, and he moves on his knees over her, he slides a hand under the small of her back to lift her up toward him, entering her with a soft, roughing stroke. Fills her solidly and strongly, their foreheads brushing, mouths open, eyes half-closed. She squirms underneath him to give him the best angle, and after a moment, he slowly starts to move.

It stays like that, considered and deliberate, rather than tipping over into the usual heated frenzy of their couplings. As if they both drive each other unmercifully, know that they are both strong enough to take whatever the other can throw at them, but there can also be this tenderness too, this unspoken care, of piecing the broken cracks together. Lucy tightens around him, once and then again, pulling him further into her, her hands coming up to curl around his head, guiding his mouth back to hers. The kiss is slow and wet and soft as well, his nose staying nudged into the crook of her cheek, their bodies riding and rising and moving in time to the slowly lengthening strokes. Until he pulls her up against him, hard, tangles his hand in her hair, and brings them to a dazzling, silent, gasping release, pushing her other hand against the quilts and driving into her once and then again. He settles on her, knees to either side of her thighs, weight on his elbows, still inside her as he spills. There’s no sound except for their ragged breathing.

After a moment, Lucy rolls them over so she can lie atop him, practically curled on his chest, head under his chin, as he slips out of her but they remain closely entangled. She doesn’t say anything, just moves to kiss his cheek. There’s a saltiness there that isn’t sweat.

When they can hear voices downstairs, they hastily sit up and reconstitute their clothing, managing to get mostly unsuspicious-looking by the time there’s a knock on the door. Flynn opens it, to see a rather harassed Saltonstall on the other side. “I have done what I can, you have my oath, but the court has ordered your immediate recall. Come with me.”

This is an ominous proclamation, and Flynn and Lucy frown at each other as they follow him down the stairs and out to the waiting carriage. Their trip through the streets is quite a bit more eventful than last time, given the number of people waiting to throw things at it, and by the time they roll up before the public hall, Lucy doesn’t need any other indications that the tide has turned badly against them. It seems as if Rittenhouse (or most probably, Emma) has been working on the justices as well, encouraging them that if they start something as ridiculous as _pardoning_ the accused, they’d have to let them all off, and then the witches might come back twice as strong as before. As they are led into the dim, stuffy, candlelit hall, and shouts start breaking out from the stalls, Lucy grimaces. Yeah. This is bad.

Saltonstall, to his great credit, insists on arguing in front of the jury that this is a terrible mistake, that there must be due process of law and the presentation of proper evidence. The jury is not interested in hearing it. They read off a laundry list of Flynn’s crimes that only Emma can have given them, judiciously edited so as not to make it apparent that all of these happened in the future, and as the shouts of “BURN HIM! BURN HIM!” get louder, the magistrate thumps his gavel. For gross and innumerable offenses, for general chaos and violence (well, they aren’t wrong, at least on that front), for un-Christian behavior, vices, and disposition, and fairly obvious service to Satan, Garcia Flynn is sentenced, effective immediately, to death by fire.

 _“No!”_ Lucy screams, kicking and struggling, as the mob surges forward to engulf both of them, manhandling them out the door and into the courtyard beyond, where – either expecting or hoping for this verdict – a stake and platform has been set up, strewn with bundles of oil-soaked hay. It’s not clear whether she was included by proxy in Flynn’s sentence, if they don’t care and figure they’ll burn the Devil’s wife along with him, or if this makes no difference at all. Saltonstall is bellowing about miscarriage of justice and murder for which may God have mercy on their souls, but no one is listening. Someone grabs Lucy by the hair, marching her forward, as she screams and Flynn starts tearing apart the crowd with his bare hands trying to get to her, as two brawny Puritans hang onto each arm and they have to get a third and fourth in there pronto to have any hope of subduing him. They’re dragged and hauled through the mud to the stake, slammed against it, and Lucy sobs in terror, trying to get hold of him, as their fingers momentarily catch and then are torn apart again. Someone punches Flynn in the face as he keeps fighting; he spits blood but doesn’t stop, knowing that this is for their lives. She can’t see a way out of this, nobody’s coming to save them, nobody’s going to –

“STOP!”

The scream rings out above the chaos of the courtyard, silencing even the unholy racket, and heads turn to see – Lucy thinks she must be dreaming – a white-faced Iris Flynn standing in the entrance to the courtyard. She is tall and dark and beautiful and dangerous in the torchlight, until it occurs to Lucy that if anyone is a genuine witch here, a woman whose wrath the Salemites should truly fear, it’s hers. Her cheekbones could cut glass, her eyes two dark pits, her hair loose on her shoulders. She looks like a demon and an angel all at once.

“Stop,” Iris repeats, taking a step and then another, as the crowd falls away, almost without its volition, to either side of her. She strides forward, skirts swirling, until she reaches the stake where Flynn and Lucy have been bound. “Untie them.”

The magistrate goggles, aghast at having his authority questioned by this subversive female, this very personification of the sins of Eve, a woman who has eaten the apple of knowledge and whose eyes are well and terribly opened. “I will not take orders from a – ”

Iris reaches into her dress and removes a modern handgun, a weapon the likes of which the late seventeenth century has never seen. She points it with rock-steady hands. “I said, untie them.”

Flynn and Lucy manage to exchange a wild glance, having obviously never expected salvation on this front, although Lucy supposes that Iris is only here on behalf of Rittenhouse, or rather her mother and John, making sure they don’t kill John’s valuable bride by accident along with the actual target. And yet, there is still a brief and terrible hope, a burning pride, in Flynn’s eyes as he stares at his daughter, some part of him still wanting to think she’s saving him because she’s seen the light somehow. He stops his hereto wild-animal struggle to get out of the ropes, waiting. The entire universe seems to dangle from a thread.

“Well?” Iris repeats. “Did I stammer?”

“I said, I will _not –_ ”

Iris shoots the magistrate. She does not turn a single hair. Just points the gun, cocks it, and pulls the trigger, all in one smooth-as-silk motion that is downright terrifying. She is utterly and completely her father, for better or for worse, and there’s a communal gasp and outcries of shock as the magistrate goes down, dead before he hits the ground. Iris turns around with a smile sharp enough to draw blood, arms outstretched, daring them to come at her. Salem has met a real witch, and there is nothing they can remotely do about it. They are terrified.

When Iris jabs with the gun again, the two meatheads from earlier scuttle to the stake, unwind the ropes, and liberate Flynn and Lucy. Lucy goes to her knees, coughing and sucking air and crying, and Flynn immediately kneels next to her, putting his arm around her shoulders and pulling her tightly into him, then helping her down off the platform as she continues to cling to him. It’s clear that if Iris wants to take them back to Rittenhouse, they’re going to have to resist somehow, but her face turns vulnerable and uncertain as she looks at them. She opens her mouth as if to say something. “I. . .” she starts. “Daddy, I. . .”

“Don’t.” Flynn’s voice is quiet, but it shivers through all of them with the force of a freezing blade. “Iris, don’t. Don’t apologize to me. You have nothing to be sorry for, _draga._ Not a single thing, do you hear me?”

Iris keeps looking at him. Her lip trembles. It’s clear that no matter how much Rittenhouse has managed to brainwash her, to convince her that they were the great white hope and that her father had unforgivably failed her, it was not strong enough to stop her fear and horror at seeing him about to be burned alive, if she had heard rumors and did her best to get here in the nick of time. “I – ” she starts, heaving a breath, before remembering where they are, and that they have to get out, that whatever spell she has cast won’t last forever. “We have to go.”

Flynn and Lucy follow closely behind her through the silent, stunned crowd, to the road beyond. She moves as if she doesn’t want to be observed, which makes Lucy wonder if she is in fact here for Rittenhouse after all. She doesn’t seem to be. They duck out and start to move fast – if Cotton Mather and his band of myrmidons are still hanging around hoping to nab more witches, their great escape could be over before it’s begun. Lucy is still shaking. Shock, she supposes; she’s had a lot of hair-raising shaves, but that feels like the closest she came to actually, truly dying. Flynn keeps a tight arm around her, keeping her pressed alongside him, as they follow Iris. Twist and turn and emerge through the city gate, until it strikes Lucy that Iris must be taking them to the Mothership. Is planning to get out of here – does she know how to pilot it? How far have they trained her to be their perfect weapon? Or –

“Stop!”

The same word, the same command, but it screeches all of them to a halt, as they whirl around to see John Rittenhouse himself, evidently just on his way back from said Mothership and not expecting in the least to run into his prisoners trying to escape (as they all are, no matter what he calls them). He jerks to a halt, staring at them. Just as before, when Lucy stopped Flynn from killing him, he’s unarmed. A man now, and the head of an ever-growing organization that has done everything terrible it can across centuries, but still.

Flynn, Lucy, and Iris remain where they are. Then Iris removes the gun again and points it at him. She says only, “Move.”

A goose walks over Lucy’s grave. By the tension in Flynn’s arm as it holds her against him, one might have walked over his as well.

“I don’t know what’s going on – Lucy, I’ve been worried, they said you’d been captured!” John looks at her entreatingly. “I didn’t intend – ”

“Oh?” Flynn growls. “Forgive me if I don’t believe that.”

“Come on. We can discuss this.” John remains where he is, hands up. “Iris, don’t do anything foolish. You know I’m fond of you, we can – ”

“Fond of me.” Iris repeats it tonelessly. She seems to be struggling very hard, the same as Flynn himself was when last pointing a gun at this man, though he was a boy then. Trying to reconcile all the lies she’s been fed by Rittenhouse with her own strength of character, her family trait to inherent and unyielding stubbornness, and hating these people with every fiber of her. This is it. Both the children grown up. The son of Rittenhouse’s founder, and the daughter of the man who has sworn to bring it down. One pointing a gun at the other. Everything hanging on it.

“Iris,” Flynn says at last, croakily. As if he can’t believe he’s advocating mercy for this man of all men, but doesn’t want to see his daughter take on the very sin he himself so nearly did. “Iris. Don’t.”

Her lips tighten further. Her finger curls. She’s thinking now, clearly. About what they’ve done. About what they’re still going to do. About how they tore her world, her family, her life, even her death, apart, and made her hate her own flesh and blood for it.

“Iris,” Lucy begs. Has no idea if she’s imploring a Flynn to spare John Rittenhouse, one more time, or to shoot him dead once and for all. “Iris, you – ”

“Please,” John says. Sounds almost like the boy he was. “Put the gun down, Iris. We’ve made mistakes, but we can still fix them. That’s the beauty of it, of this entire thing. Once you’re back to yourself, once you remember who you really are – ”

_“I remember who I really am.”_

And with that, Iris Flynn, Garcia and Lorena’s daughter, pulls the trigger.


	10. Chapter 10

**xiv.**

Nobody has any idea where they are.

(For that matter, and perhaps more pertinently, nobody has any idea _when_ they are.)

Their memories of the immediately preceding moments are more than a little jumbled, flashing in and out in bursts like a poorly tuned television aerial, as Lucy sits with her head between her knees and doesn’t imagine she’ll feel like coming up any time soon. Iris shot John Rittenhouse – yes, she remembers that part, remembers it with appalling clarity, the look on Flynn’s face as the sound of it echoed like thunder. John appeared to be dead when he went down, but none of them stopped to be sure –not even Flynn, who might once have insisted on administering the coup de grace himself. They needed to get out of there, he never wanted his daughter to do this, to be like him, to take on the same sin, and none of them thought of anything but making it to the Mothership. Iris, it turns out, _can_ pilot it – sort of. She has been trained to be Rittenhouse’s most elite operative, the insurance plan for Emma, but she has never actually flown the damn thing outside of carefully controlled test conditions. That just-completed jump was her first real one, ever. They’re lucky she stuck the landing, but she also wasn’t exactly sure how to aim or where, and that is a very dangerous thing to do with a time machine. They could, theoretically, be just about anywhen. The Ice Age, the Jurassic, earlier, when Earth is still a flaming ball of rock inhospitable to life. Or further, far further, in the opposite direction, moments before all time ends and the sun goes supernova. There is absolutely no way to know.

Lucy groans, pretty sure she’s just going to have to give up the ghost and be sick anyway, but still trying not to. She feels as slammed around as if she has been on one of those planes that fly through the eyewalls of hurricanes, or sent through an industrial washer. She is obviously not about to criticize Iris’ driving when the alternative was to stay in Salem and be burned as witches or hanged for John’s murder ( _is_ he dead? Rittenhouse still has plenty of members, it’s probably not destroyed outright, but is it weakened? Has that affected their existence in the future?) but she doesn’t feel up to facing whatever fresh catastrophe is doubtless in front of them. Not yet.

A hand touches her back. “Lucy,” Flynn’s voice says in her ear. _“Lucy.”_

Lucy utters an indeterminate noise that she hopes will convey the information that yes, she is alive, and yes, she more or less thinks she’ll stay that way, but that her guts have been rearranged like a collapsing Jenga puzzle and she is going to need a moment here. She hears Flynn say something in a low voice to Iris, who cycles the hatch open, and a blast of cold, pine-smelling air hits them from outside. No lava, then. Hopefully no supernova (or dinosaurs) either. Lucy tries to get her tongue around words to tell Iris about the autopilot override, the one that is supposed to enable Rufus to pull them out, until she remembers that Emma disabled it while pulling off her Grand Theft Auto in 1829. Maybe it can be activated again, though Flynn is clearly the expert in that department and not Lucy, but they have to know what the hell happened first.

After several more deeply unpleasant minutes, Lucy straightens up slowly, hoping that this will not result in turning the Mothership into the Vomit Comet. It does not, thankfully, and the first thing she sees is Flynn still bending over her with an anxious expression on his face. What little Lucy can see of their landing spot through the open door is forest. There’s a hint of blue sky, a patch of sun, so it almost seems idyllic, some return to nature, away from the fuss and mess and chaos of civilization. “Where – when are we?”

“I don’t know.” Iris continues to examine the readouts. “Someone messed with the processing core, as well as the other software systems, so I don’t have the usual information.” She flips a switch up and down a few times, clearly hoping for a reboot, while Lucy looks pointedly at the man who disconnected the Mothership’s CPU and agreed to install a remote lock on the control console. Clearly, if trying home improvement by yourself is usually a terrible idea, DIYing your time machine is an even worse one. “I was – I was aiming forward.”

“We’ll work it out.” Flynn’s voice is rusty when he speaks, as he tries to catch his daughter’s eye, but she won’t look at him either. “It might not be the worst thing in the world to have a moment to catch our breath.”

Lucy does not disagree, as she still hasn’t caught hers, and undoes her crash webbing, preparing to stand up. This, however, is more than her body’s upside-down equilibrium feels at all like cooperating with, and she takes a few swaying steps and then almost falls out the door, clutching onto the landing strut as she is thoroughly and wretchedly sick. Her mouth burns foully as she remains on all fours, gasping, and Flynn is outside after her in a flash, kneeling next to her and trying to get her to put her arm around his neck. Lucy is feeling too grim to argue, and does so, letting him pick her up. He gets a better grip on her, swinging her across his chest bridal-style, as Iris steps out as well, gaze flickering to them and then away. It’s clear that they need to do some recon, and she takes the lead, bushwhacking steadily through the trees with Flynn (and thus Lucy) traipsing behind her. They have been walking for about forty minutes when Flynn lifts his head and sniffs. “I think we’re in Russia.”

Both Iris and Lucy give him how-do-you-know-that looks, and he gives them the look of a man from Eastern Europe, who has worked in intelligence and espionage for most of his adult life and as such has spent a lot of fucking time in Russia. “Siberia, I think,” he goes on, as they make it to the top of another hill and gaze down at the jumble of wilderness below. “Somewhere in the taiga. Eastern, probably, since the trees look like larch and I can’t see any wetlands. Kolyma, maybe? Or Kamchatka Krai. Not winter, luckily, but it’s still going to be cold when it gets dark. Or it’s the midnight sun and it won’t, but either way. We don’t want to be exposed out here.”

“We’d have to go back to the Mothership, then,” Iris says, likewise with the cool, detached tone of a soldier talking strategy to her commander. “But there’s no food and not much space for shelter there, and we’d still have to walk back in the morning. I think we can manage one night out in the open if we need to.”

Her father opens his mouth, then shuts it and nods tersely. For her part, feeling a bit like a literal deadweight while the Flynns are tasked with saving their asses, Lucy tugs at his sleeve. “I – I think I’m all right now. You can put me down.”

He looks dubious, but does so, clearly hoping that this does not trigger another projectile vomiting episode. Lucy hopes so too, and steadies herself on his arm until she is confident that it won’t. Once more, she can feel Iris watching them under her eyelashes, not saying anything out loud but not entirely approving either, and Lucy winces. Iris _has_ saved their lives, and seems to be sincere in her decision to turn against Rittenhouse (to say the least, she would not have shot John if she wasn’t) but she is still utterly inscrutable, and far from safe or predictable. Again, too much like her father, and too angry at everything that’s led her here.

After a pause, they start to move again, and trudge for another hour at least. Lucy keeps glancing around warily – if they _are_ in Siberia, and she sees no reason to doubt Flynn’s diagnosis, there are man-eating grizzlies out here, and as the only weapon they have is Iris’ pistol, that might not prove terribly efficacious against a charging one-ton brown bear. She thinks of all the spooky things she’s read about that have involved the Russian wilderness – the USS _Jeannette_ expedition in 1879-81, the Tunguska event in 1908, the Dyatlov Pass incident in 1959, Solzhenitsyn and the Stalinist gulags, the Lykov family who lived in complete isolation for decades, the ice highways on frozen rivers, the aforementioned bears, and all the other ways in which this vast, untamed, fey place can kill you. Lucy is from California. Outside of her time traveling, she’s never been anywhere outside a few hours’ drive from a city. Her dislike of small spaces is well noted, but somehow this, here, with too _much_ space, is almost as unsettling.

The sun has vanished behind the horizon, and the wind chill is enough to make Lucy’s teeth rattle, by the time they finally spot something remotely resembling human presence ahead – a cabin, in fact. It doesn’t look like anyone’s home, although either way, Russian hermits are probably not terribly huge on unexpected company. Iris shifts to get hold of her gun, and Flynn gives her a terse look, clearly wishing that she would let him handle the shooting part rather than having to keep doing it, but doesn’t say anything. They venture cautiously up the porch, and (not sure if they want it to be answered or not) they knock.

Boy, Lucy thinks. I sure hope that Flynn isn’t completely mistaken, and that we’re not actually near a little-known Soviet nuclear power plant called Chernobyl, 1986. Yes, that would require them to be literally on the other side of the country, but still.

When nobody answers, Iris and Flynn glance at each other, take up positions to either side of the door, and he kicks it in as Iris covers him. They make a good (and scary) team, and as they peer into the dim cabin, waiting to see if something is going to leap out at them, Lucy tries to slow her racing heart. She still feels too cold in a way that does not owe itself to Siberian weather, unable to catch her breath. Shock, probably. Now that they have, even for a moment, stopped moving, that there is the possibility of sitting down and facing her near-death in Salem and the chaos of their uncontrolled escape through time and the trudge through the taiga, not to remotely mention the _rest_ of recent events, she will be lucky to get through tonight without a complete meltdown. Not yet. There are still things to worry about apart from herself. She’ll hold it together.

Still nothing. Iris and Flynn advance in cautiously and take a look, trying to guess the approximate time period, and Lucy quickly finds a newspaper. As Flynn is the only one of them who reads Russian, she hands it to him, and the date is discovered to be April 4, 1965. At least it was, as there is no way to know how current the paper is, but it doesn’t look yellowed or old or left for too long. This is definitely an outpost of some sort: there is a moth-eaten sofa, a radio, a faded portrait of Stalin, cross-country skis and other gear, and a hunting rifle, which Flynn immediately appropriates. He finds the ammo boxes and loads it, going back outside to further check their surroundings, while Iris and Lucy sink onto the rickety kitchen chairs. This all feels like the prologue to a horror movie to Lucy, as if someone or some _thing_ is going to come out of the woods at midnight, and suddenly, she doesn’t want Flynn out there alone, even with the rifle. She starts to stand up. “Maybe we should keep moving.”

“Not at night.” Iris looks at her for the first time since she rescued them in Salem, gaze cool and unrevealing. “This is Russia in the middle of the Cold War, and if – Daddy’s right about where we are, we’re on the far eastern coast, probably right across the Bering Sea from Alaska. I’m guessing this is a hotspot for smuggling the KGB into American territory.”

Lucy can’t help but be impressed at this display of historical knowledge, as she always is, even as she remembers that Iris has been educated by Rittenhouse and all of it has been meant to identify and target the places where it can be more usefully changed. It is still unbelievably jarring to see this beautiful, intelligent, dangerous, guarded young woman, when she was taking care of the scared little girl just a few weeks ago, and Iris is not even her daughter. It must be a thousand, a hundred thousand times more surreal and heartbreaking for Flynn. An unhinged little giggle slips out. “So, uh, I guess they really can see Russia from their house here?”

Iris looks at her blankly, not understanding the joke, and Lucy bites her tongue. She looks at the paper again, trying to make any sense of the Cyrillic characters, but it is impenetrable. She opens the cupboards and checks the supplies instead; this definitely looks like the mid-sixties, and there are even a few American brands, as whoever lives here must not be opposed to taking contraband in trade, if the alternative is eating Soviet canned food all the time. The Cuban Missile Crisis was three years ago, assuming the date on the paper is accurate. Khrushchev was deposed last October, and Brezhnev is First Secretary. Schoolchildren across America are probably still practicing their duck-and-cover-under-the-desk drills religiously.

Lucy shuts the cupboards and goes through the curtain to the small alcove that proves to be the bedroom. A Russian Orthodox icon sits on the table, along with a bottle of vodka and a half-full pack of American Marlboros. She lies down on the bed, shivering. Leering images of the crowd in Salem, baying for their blood, swirl against her eyelids whenever she closes them, and she opens them again with a jerk, clenching her fists.

She stays there for some interminable interlude, until the sound of shouting and then the distinctive crack of a gunshot outside wrenches her upright as if someone has yanked a fishhook in her belly. She almost has a panic attack as she lurches off the bed and runs back through the cabin, remembering just in time not to burst into the open if someone unfriendly is out there shooting. “Garcia? _Garcia!”_

“I’m here, Lucy.”  He sounds more than a little tense as he answers, but Lucy momentarily clutches onto the doorframe in relief, as she and Iris peer out and see the shape of a body lying at his feet. It is (or was, probably) the owner of this cabin, also with a gun in hand. He doesn’t look like a crazy, bearded survivalist, so Iris’ theory is probably right, and he was a KGB agent returning from smuggling fellow operatives across the Bering Strait in battered fishing trawlers. Flynn is already kneeling next to him, ransacking his jacket in search of ID.

“Did you have to shoot him?” Lucy mutters, more for the sake of form than anything. She knows Flynn was never going to let an armed man into the cabin with her and Iris, and the guy likely would have done the same, but still.

Flynn shrugs. “I don’t like Russians.”

Lucy bites her tongue on remarking that he doesn’t like anyone, though she considers that a man from former-Yugoslavia, who has worked for American intelligence, probably doesn’t, no. They find a battered USSR state identity card, which gives the dead man’s name as Nikolai, but no obvious KGB affiliation, as he’s probably not dumb enough to carry it around with him. Lucy hopes that no superiors will be radioing in to check on him, or asking him to arrange another drop. She is suddenly tempted to head straight back to the Mothership (though with their luck, Nikolai’s friends picked it up, decided it was a strange American nuclear missile or spy device, and called it into Moscow) and get out of here, rest or no rest. It doesn’t seem like the most peaceful of places, anyway.

It, however, is still pitch-black and freezing, and the only thing more ill-advised than possibly and inadvertently turning the Cold War hot is to try to find their way back to the Mothership in the depths of Siberian night. Once Flynn has dragged Nikolai’s body a few hundred yards away from the cabin and scuffed some leaves and undergrowth over it, he returns and heads inside, grimacing. Lucy can see blood on his shirt that isn’t from his immediately previous activities, and frowns. “Did you break your stitches?”

“I said I’m _fine,_ Lucy.”

“No,” she snaps. “Sit down and let me check.”

Flynn is briefly flummoxed, but Lucy grabs him by the arm and forces him into the rickety chair, as Iris almost looks amused. She hides it quickly, vanishing through the curtain to the bedroom, which leaves Flynn and Lucy, for the moment, alone. Lucy rummages in the cupboards until she finds the first aid kit, and pulls Flynn’s shirt and the crusted bandages away from where they have stuck to his shoulder wound, which isn’t looking terribly happy. She sucks in a breath. “This could be infected.”

Flynn answers with a grunt and only a faint flinch as she prods. Wyatt’s neat stitches are mostly holding, but have tugged loose and been spotted with blood in places. Then she lifts the hem of his shirt to check on his side, which has granulated somewhat better but still will require close watching. She has not come this far just to let Flynn die stupidly of septicemia, especially if he is too stubborn to admit that it is even a possibility. At last he says, “You’re not my nurse, Lucy.”

“No, I’m not, am I?” Lucy tries to keep her voice down, as she knows Iris can probably hear them – the cabin is small and the curtain is thin – and doesn’t really feel like an audience for this argument. “I might never know what I – what _we_ are, but heaven forbid I take care of you?”

“It’s like I said in Salem. I don’t –” He grimaces again as she unscrews the pungent-smelling tube of antibiotic ointment, hoping that sixties Soviet medicine can get the job done, and dabs it on. “Can’t you just give up trying to save me? One of these days?”

“Is that really what you want?” Lucy gulps back her usual nausea at the sight of blood, as her stomach still isn’t very pleased from earlier, and refocuses. “Or is it just what you’re asking for, deflecting with, because you’re afraid?”

“I’m not afraid.”

“Sure,” Lucy says. “We can go with that.”

Flynn looks miffed that she thinks he would ever be less than 100% forthcoming with his feelings (yeah, where would she ever get that idea?) “Lucy – ”

“Garcia.” Lucy wipes her hands on one of the kitchen rags. She doesn’t want to fight with him again. “Please stop talking.”

For once, Flynn does as instructed, snapping his mouth shut on whatever misjudged opinion he was about to offer. Lucy gets the kettle and brews them both a cup of strong black Russian tea, then one for Iris as well, and the three of them sit around the tiny table in something almost like familiar silence. Once they’re done, Lucy gets up. “I think I’m going to try to sleep.”

“I’ll keep watch.” Flynn answers almost abstractedly, moving to get the hunting rifle and putting it on the table next to him. “You both should.”

“No,” Iris says. “I’ll sit up too.”

“You should go to bed.”

“I’m not tired.”

“As usual?” It slips out, almost before Flynn can catch it, and he looks as if he wants to bite it back, but can’t. “It’s a different sort of monster under the bed, _draga.”_

Iris’ lip trembles in something too sad to be a smile. “I know.”

Lucy quietly gets to her feet, wanting to leave the two of them together, and backs through the curtain to the bedroom. The wind is sighing and keening through the trees outside, she thinks of Nikolai lying dead in the grove, and the immensity of the darkness and wilderness beyond this tiny foothold, and burrows fully clothed under the covers, unable to stop shaking. She curls up on her side. The bedclothes smell of damp and smoke and some too-harsh cologne.

The ghosts of Salem come rushing up once more when she closes her eyes. She refuses to open them again, breathing shallowly, clutching a fistful of pillow until she feels at all grounded. Just one night. They can get out of here tomorrow. Exactly where is, as ever, the question. Hope Iris can steer this time. But 1965 is the closest she’s been to the modern world, to her own time, since she left 2017 to go to 1861 London, and she feels a desolation at the thought of once more leaving it. Even if back-of-beyond Cold War Russia isn’t anything like home, at least there’s the chance, the glimpse, the thought of reaching it. Has history been fixed yet, or rather, moderately less torched? Does she exist again? Can she go back?

Does she _want_ to go back?

Lucy Preston has spent a lot of time in the past by now. Far more than anyone should. And yet, she has absolutely no idea, not even a flicker, of her future.

It takes a while. Her dreams aren’t pleasant. But she sleeps.

* * *

“Here,” Iris says, holding out the bottle of vodka and the pack of Marlboros. “Pass the time?”

Flynn’s lip twitches. “I don’t think I can agree, as a parent, to offer my daughter alcohol and cigarettes.”

“I’m offering them to you.” Iris raises an eyebrow, in a gesture that reminds him so much of his own that it makes his heart ache. She gets up, finds a lighter in one of the drawers, and pulls out one of the Reds, flicking a spark to it and taking a drag. She blows out a fine ghost of smoke, not saying a word, until Flynn finally takes one of his own, feeling that if she’s going to, he’ll have to as well. His shoulder throbs. He’s in more pain than he’ll admit to Lucy. Some self-medication might not be the worst thing in the world.

They sit there, both listening hard for anything moving outside, forged into this uneasy unity for the time being. Iris gets up again and lights some of the thick white candles, wedging them into empty jars. There is obviously no electricity up here, so while it might technically be the middle of the twentieth century, it feels much earlier. Flynn wants to say something, wants to speak to her so desperately, but he is afraid of shattering whatever fragile rapprochement exists. Finally he says, “Thank you. For Salem.”

“You’re – you’re welcome.” Iris sits down again, tapping the ashes off her cigarette and staring into the candlelight. Her eyes are the image of Lorena’s, and Flynn’s heart twists in half again. “I don’t know what came over me. It was like I’d been asleep, all that time, and then just like that – I woke up.” She shrugs, almost diffidently, painfully. “I saw what they were, and I didn’t want to be one of them anymore. Daddy, are you. . . are you angry with me?”

“How could I ever be angry with you?” Flynn, startled past all reticence, reaches across the table and grabs her hand, holding hard, tears trembling at the edge of control despite himself. “How could I ever? When you were strong enough to overcome those bastards, when you _saved_ us, when you would have had every right not to? No, my baby. No, I’m not. I’m not.”

Iris looks down. Very quietly, she says, “Do you think I killed him? John Rittenhouse?”

Flynn does not want to even think about the answer to that question, when once it would have been all he cared about. He half-hopes that John is still alive, that Iris has not had to take on the guilt of murder even once; if so, he can finish it later. He’s used to killing, he’s already aware of the cost. He’ll carry it. He doesn’t want her to.

He says, “I don’t know.”

Iris’ fingers clench briefly in his. After a moment she says, “Why did we end up here?”

“I have an idea.” Flynn finishes his own cigarette, pours himself a dram of vodka, and knocks it back. “Your grandfather.”

Iris looks startled. “My grandfather?”

“Yes. My father. His name was Asher, Asher Flynn.” His throat sticks; he hasn’t talked about the old bastard in a long time. Probably since Lorena. “His parents – my grandparents – met in World War II. His mother was a resistance fighter in the Independent State of Croatia – that was what it was called then, it was a puppet regime controlled by the Nazis. She tried to break people out of Jasenovac concentration camp, the place they called the Auschwitz of the Balkans. His father was a Red Army soldier, we don’t know what happened to him. Grandmother thought he probably died in Stalingrad. It was only one night, and she never saw him again. My father did not say so, but I got the feeling that she had not much wanted a child, and resented him for it.”

Iris is watching him intently. She has never heard this part of her family history – has never heard any of it, really, as she died when she was five, when none of this mattered. Now she’s alive again, and it does. She can sense that this is a painful topic, and waits, instead of pressing for details. Finally, as he’s still groping for the words, she says, “And?”

“His name was Aleksandr.” Flynn takes another drink. “When he was six, Grandmother married a British Army officer, George Flynn, and he changed it to Asher. He grew up mostly in strict English boarding schools, but when he was eighteen, he ran away and went back to Yugoslavia. Became a spy and saboteur against the Russians – blamed his father for leaving his mother, for dying, I suppose. He met my mother, Maria – I don’t think you remember her, you were only one when she died – when she moved from America in 1970. They were married in ‘72, I was born in ‘74. Those are the basics.”

“So. . .” Iris frowns. “You think Grandpa might be. . . here? In Russia somewhere, working as a spy against the KGB? And that was what I was thinking of, without knowing it?”

“I don’t know for sure, but if it’s 1965 – yes, he would be.” Flynn blows out a breath. “I doubt it’s anywhere particularly nearby. Russia is a big place, after all. But yes, that might have been what drew us here, unconsciously. And my father – it’s complicated.”

Iris considers him. “How so?”

“He was. . . difficult.” Flynn looks back at the candle, dripping waxen gremlins in its jam jar. “He had a temper. He was angry a lot. He and my mother would fight, and I thought he would hit her, and I had to protect her, even when I was very young. He thought she coddled me too much, and she thought he raised me like a soldier, not a son. She was. . . sad. All the time, she always had it about her. She had been married once before, in America, but her husband died in a car crash and her son, my older half-brother, died when he was six, from an allergic reaction to a bee sting. My father almost blamed her for it, that she had never gotten over it, that she never seemed to be happy all the way. He said he was sorry that we were only the replacements. They. . .”

At that, Flynn pauses. He can still hear their shouting, and the way he played nervously with his cowboy toys, aged eight, hoping they would stop. “They divorced, finally, when I was fourteen. I always admired my father, in a way. I wanted to be like him, because everyone was afraid of him, and he could do whatever he wanted. But I knew as well that he was not a good man, and was not a good father. I always told myself that if I ever had children, I would be nothing like him. I made up a little with him before he died, and he admitted some of his faults, but it was never forgiven entirely. I talked with. . . your mother about it, before you were born. That I was so afraid I would become him. And now, knowing that I have, and that you’ve become like me, like him too – no wonder we’re here. It is a big circle. None of us can escape it.”

Iris doesn’t seem to know what to say to that. She opens her mouth as if to apologize again, then stops. Finally she says, very quietly, “What happened, Daddy? With me and. . . and Mama?”

Flynn looks at the tabletop. “Do you want to know?”

“Yes.” Iris doesn’t blink. “I want to know.”

If she’s sure, Flynn thinks, then he might as well, as he can hardly feel much more gutted than he presently does. So, as simply as he can (which is impossible when the whole thing is this insane) he explains to Iris what happened, that she and Lorena were killed by Rittenhouse, that he got a journal and a chance to change it, stole a time machine, and has been trying ever since, ever more impossibly, to bring them back. That he doesn’t know how he somehow saved her, but not Lorena. That she has been brought back to life only to be trained and molded into Rittenhouse’s perfect weapon for fifteen years, that she has been robbed, that she has been _robbed._ That all of this has become enmeshed, ever more impossibly, with Lucy Preston, and the question of her own fate, her own destiny. And that, well. That Flynn knows the least about at all.

When he finishes, Iris is silent, rather (and excusably) stunned. “So,” she says at last, barely above a whisper. “You – you didn’t abandon us?”

“No.” Flynn feels in sore need of another cigarette, good examples be damned, and lights it, struggling to keep his voice even. “Not by any choice of mine. Not once. Not until I saw you in London in 1861, and you ran to me, and I thought you had to be a trick or a cruel joke or a. . . Iris, I’m sorry. My baby, I am so sorry. I don’t even know if I was the one who saved you, or how, or why any of it happened. I would give anything, _anything,_ to have saved your mother as well, for the two of you to be alive again, to live together, even if it meant I had to trade my own life in doing it. But.” Flynn takes a shuddering breath. “I don’t. . .  I don’t know if I can.”

It is the first time he has ever admitted it out loud, the possibility of failure on his quest, when he has ostensibly succeeded at half of it with Iris, but at such a terrible cost. He feels impossibly, unbearably guilty. No, how can he do this, how can he admit defeat, when she is sitting across from him, when he knows there still might be a chance somehow for Lorena? He will not be able to live with any suggestion that he loves her any infinitesimal fraction less than he did, he does: with every inch, every sinew, every atom and particle and breath and dream and grief of him, the sun around which his dark and battered world revolved, the stars, the moon. He cannot concede that. He cannot simply replace it, or move on. He can’t.

(And yet – if he is being entirely honest with himself, which is a terrible thing to do that he avoids as much as possible – he knows that nonetheless, he has started to. Never meaning to, never wanting to, completely out of his control. And that is the most unforgivable thing of all.)

“Lucy,” Iris says, with perfect and unsettling clairvoyance. “You love her, don’t you?”

“I – ” Flynn’s first instinct, of course, is to deny it. That, however, is all it remains: an instinct. The actual words get stuck.

Iris smiles, very faintly and very sadly. “I’m sorry for what I said about her.”

“I – ” Flynn says again, wondering how they have gotten to the next stage of this, when he’s still hung up on the last part. “I’ll – I won’t. I’ll –I’ll try harder to bring your mother back, I’ll stop. I know it was a mistake, I’ll – ”

“Daddy.” Iris reaches across the table and puts her hand over his. Her voice isn’t terribly steady. “That’s not what I was asking you to do.”

Flynn careens to a jumbled halt, utterly thrown. “You. . .you weren’t?”

“No.” Iris knuckles at her eyes. “Of course I want Mama back. I know you do too. I know it. But if not. . . if it can’t happen, if you’ve done everything and then some, I don’t. . . I don’t want you to live like that for the rest of your life. You know.” She gestures timidly at their surroundings, at the literal irony embodied in it, the presence of his father, of the old family wounds, of all the Flynns’ mistakes. “In the past.”

Garcia Flynn has absolutely no clue what to say to that. He opens his mouth, then shuts it. The silence returns, even as the candles are starting to burn low, swimming in the wax, a small flame adrift among the darkness. He gulps a breath, then another. There is an immense ache in his chest, torn and raw, that is entirely different from the pain in his shoulder. He isn’t sure which one hurts more, or which is the kind of pain that means it might ever heal.

Quietly, Iris says, “Daddy, I’m tired.”

The tears almost come up his throat then, but he doesn’t let them. Instead he nods, gets to his feet, steps around the table, and picks her up out of the chair, carrying her to the ratty sofa and settling down with her. She’s much too big to sit on his lap now, but neither of them care. He holds her tighter than he ever has, than he ever remembers, from when they first laid her in his arms as a newborn in the hospital in Dubrovnik, on that sunny morning when his world changed forever. He rocks her, humming a tuneless lullaby under his breath, as the tears start falling freely. As Iris Flynn drifts off to sleep, at last, and somewhere in the darkness, for a short while at least, Garcia Flynn once more believes in God.

* * *

Lucy wakes up feeling better, at least somewhat. She sits up slowly, testing the steadiness of her head and stomach, but the sleep has helped, and she doesn’t seem any more crappy than could be expected. She is hungry, which is a good sign, and swings cautiously out of bed, pushing the curtain aside and emerging into the main living area of the cabin. Glances across to the sofa, and sees father and daughter asleep on it, Iris curled up on Flynn’s lap and her head cradled against his shoulder, both of them dead to the world. Lucy doesn’t want to disturb them for anything, and tries to fix breakfast from the tinned goods as quietly as she can. The world outside is nothing but a sea of thick, featureless mist.

Flynn and Iris begin to stir as they smell food (read: powdered eggs and toast made from black bread that is the approximate weight and consistency of petrified wood). Lucy makes more of the tea, scrapes some strange Russian preserve over the toast, and carries it to the table, as they blink, yawn, disentangle themselves, and sit up, looking groggy but shyly pleased. The atmosphere certainly seems different, and they eat in more or less congenial silence. Then Lucy says, “Are we going to try to make it back to the Mothership?”

“Not in this fog, we can’t.” Flynn mops up the remainder of his eggs with his toast. “I’m still not sure exactly where we are, either. Somewhere in the Far East, close to Alaska. Kamchatka Peninsula, most likely. If so – ”

“It’s a prime Cold War battleground,” Lucy completes. “Iris told me about her theory last night.”

“Ah.” Flynn coughs, looking almost proud. “I’m sure you know, then. I’ll go out and take a look, see if anyone has come sniffing for Nikolai. You two should stay here.”

“No,” Lucy says. “I don’t want you to go by yourself.”

Flynn, who of course prefers doing things by himself, opens his mouth to object, but Lucy is insistent. It is also most sensible to leave Iris to hold down the fort, as she can handle a gun if unexpected intruders come knocking, and Flynn and Lucy bundle up from the jackets and wraps in the tiny closet. All of it smells like fish. It is, however, far preferable to freezing, and Flynn makes sure he has plenty of ammunition for the hunting rifle, which he slings over his shoulder with casual ease. He takes out the flashlight and the matches and anything else he thinks they might need if they have the bad luck to get lost, and loads it into a rucksack. Then, promising Iris that they will be back by nightfall, they cautiously step outside the cabin and shut the door.

The first thing they do is check on Nikolai. He has frozen overnight, and does not appear to have attracted the attention of anything large and carnivorous, but Flynn decides he’s still too close to the cabin for comfort. He drags the body a further way, well out of sight or wind, and while Lucy tries not to watch, hacks a shallow grave out of the earth. She thinks of that Russian Orthodox icon on the bedside table back in the cabin. It’s too late now to feel guilty about his death, especially given that she wasn’t responsible for it and that he might well have done the same to them, but she can’t help it. She’s tired of people dying, famous ones or nameless ones alike. She loves history, but she is so exhausted by the weight of it. By the tragedy. How it goes, and comes, and goes, and comes again, inexorable.

Flynn finishes up, brushes his hands off, and they tramp deeper into the woods, looking for any hint of other human presence. If Nikolai was indeed KGB, they’ll presumably be back here before long with a new batch of operatives for him to smuggle into Alaska, and even Flynn probably can’t take on a whole squadron of angry Russian special ops alone. (Not that that would stop him trying.) As they walk, breath steaming silver in the chill, Lucy says, “Why on earth do you think we ended up here?”

Flynn glances at her sidelong. His voice is carefully offhand. “No idea.”

Something about that gives Lucy the distinct impression that he might know exactly why, or at least strongly suspects, but doesn’t feel like sharing it with her. She debates whether or not to press, as she’s also deeply curious about what he and Iris might have talked about last night to lead to that tender scene this morning on the couch, but she knows it is not her place. She keeps close to Flynn, keeping a wary eye out for bears, but nothing, thankfully. Then when they reach the top of a hill, some of the mist thins and she can glimpse a truly spectacular jigsaw of white-capped mountains in the distance. Her jaw drops. “Wow.”

“Yes, this is Kamchatka, all right.” Flynn seems to enjoy her reaction. “Like the view?”

“It’s amazing,” Lucy says, as they start down the trail on the far side. It’s steep and slippery, and Flynn keeps hold of her arm most of the way, as her shoes from 1692 are not exactly up to the rigors of more Siberian tundra-tramping; they are already decidedly chewed up from yesterday. At the bottom, she gets a strong whiff of sulfur, and looks at Flynn in confusion. “What, is there a local portal to hell around here?”

“No, probably a hot spring. This place has a lot of geysers, and half those mountains are volcanoes.” He remarks this casually, as if it is not yet another way in which they might die here, and laughs at the look on her face. Actually laughs, with gentle, genuine amusement. She doesn’t think she has ever seen him do that before. “Don’t worry, most of them are extinct. But that’s why they call Kamchatka the Land of Fire and Ice. Come on.”

Curiosity piqued, Lucy follows him to the source of the sulfur smell, which turns out to be a small pool shielded by a tumble of rocks and a larch grove, smoking gently in the midmorning sun. Flynn kneels down and tests it with a finger, then grins. “Here.”

Lucy crouches next to him and puts her hand in warily, bracing for it to be freezing, as one would imagine for a pond in the middle of the Siberian wilderness. But instead it is shockingly, delightfully hot, just the right temperature for a long and luxurious bath. It makes her gasp involuntarily with the pleasure, and she can feel Flynn once more looking at her sidelong, almost hesitantly, as if waiting to see what she is going to do about it. The possibility of KGB agents, bears, or KGB-agent bears remains, of course, considerable. But after a moment, Lucy makes up her mind. Stands up, pulls off the wraps and jackets and the battered remnants of her Salem clothes, shivering all over as the cold wind stings her bare skin, and jumps in.

She splashes fully under, has a moment to hope that it’s not too deep or there’s not a hidden current or some horrible flesh-eating bacteria or whatever else, but the sensation of immersion is too glorious to care. She bobs up, and discovers that the water is about four and a half feet deep, with a bottom of smooth-worn stones, so she can stand easily. She ducks down so the water covers her shoulders, hair drifting loose like dark weed, and shudders again with the feeling of it soaking into her raw and sore and aching body. Looks up at Flynn, staring at her from the bank like a man struck down by a heavenly vision, and says, “Don’t tell me you’re afraid to get wet?”

He does that seemingly unconscious thing with his tongue that he sometimes does while looking at her, while continuing to stare as if he can’t stop. Then – slowly at first, then faster – he pulls off his own clothes as well, heaping them on the bank. Swings one leg over the edge, then the other, and pushes into the gentle eddy of the water. Crosses the stones, and comes to her.

Lucy shudders all over, for another reason, as she lifts her wet arms and puts them around his neck. This is, as far as she can recall, the first time they have ever been completely naked together, seen each other in the full light of day, as all their previous encounters have been with some or even most of their clothes on, ripped aside in the necessary places but never taken off all the way. This is different, this is intimate, this is not just hunger or lust or challenge. His hands slide slowly down her torso, under the water, settling on her hips and lifting her. They remain there, holding each other without a word, steam rising around them in thick gusts and swirls. Then she tilts his head down to hers, puts a hand in his hair, and opens her mouth to kiss him.

Flynn makes a soft sound, likewise different from anything she’s heard from him as he hoists her up on him and leans back in the water, letting them float. It’s dreamy, slow, wet, hot, sweet, as they splash and sway in the warmth. Lucy doesn’t stop kissing him until she’s good and ready to, and only then, moves her head slightly away to rest their noses together. She notes vaguely that his shoulder wound looks somewhat better, so hopefully the antibiotic cream is tackling it before it gets any more inflamed. She wants to look at all of him. He is tall and lean and strong and scarred, rough-hewn, worn around the edges, solid as a rock. He moves to lift her again, as her legs lock around his waist, and she can feel him nudging between her legs. She hitches herself forward, arching her hips, and takes him inside her.

Flynn enters her with an accompanying rush of hot water, hard and deep, and Lucy moans as their slick bodies slide together to the point of completion. Her fingers claw in the muscles of his back, her hand coming up to the nape of his neck, urging his mouth down to explore her breasts, sucking and teasing. His hand slides down her spine, onto the small of her back, molding her more closely against him. He thrusts at the same time he bites her nipple, making her squeal, and she braces her forearms on his shoulders, lifting herself slightly, changing the angle of his penetration as he rides up into her. He whirls her around, slips half out, and then claims her again, as deep as he can. She breathes the steam and the salt and the sting of him, of them, sweet and slow. It feels downright pagan. Elemental, primeval. Magical.

It doesn’t take long for either of them to be urged to release, Lucy’s body shuddering in deep, uncontrollable spasms as some of the tension and toil and pain finally begins to be burned out of her. She gulps and gasps as Flynn’s mouth muses against hers, half a kiss and half a shared breath, strong and soft. They remain floating in an island of mist and steam, something cool on Lucy’s flushed face, a snowflake drifting from the pearly sky. Fire and ice, she thinks. Indeed.

At last, she shifts, letting Flynn slide out of her, and remains with her arms entangled around his neck as they sway. Then she says, “We need to make it back to Wyatt and Rufus. We need to find where they are, and what has happened to history as a result of – whatever Iris did to John Rittenhouse. We can’t do this alone, Garcia. We need the team. We need to fight. Together.”

For a moment, he doesn’t answer, eyes half-closed, still holding onto her. As if he wants to stay like this for just a bit, just a bit longer, and then he will wake up. Then, without a word, he nods.


	11. Chapter 11

**xv.**

Lucy and Flynn hold hands on the walk back to the cabin. They don’t even exactly mean to, after they scramble out of the hot springs and shiver and shake themselves dry enough to get dressed again, teeth chattering in the chilly air. Lucy can feel the color in her cheeks, the sting of exertion, and something else, deeper and richer, moving in her like a vein of molten ore, some part of the trouble and danger and terror of Salem finally exorcised and with this allowed to take its place. Flynn’s hand almost engulfs hers, his thumb running absently over her knuckles, and once he reaches over to slick a damp tendril of hair out of her eyes, a small, tender gesture that catches her by surprise. Neither of them are quite sure how, but something has definitely changed back there. They have been at odds in some way, whether large or small, since – well, forever, but they’re not any more. Their stars are in the same orbit now. Both of them can feel it.

They make it back through the woods without incident, as most of the fog has burned off, and Flynn is practically whistling as they descend through the slender trunks of the larches. That, however, vanishes in the next instant, as they catch sight of the cabin. The door is open, it definitely looks to have been violently forced, and there is shouting from inside. One of the voices is definitely Iris’s. The other sounds like a man, speaking Russian. Oh Jesus. If one of Nikolai’s friends arrived, found his comrade dead, and Iris here by herself –

Flynn panics, rips the hunting rifle off his shoulder, and sprints down the hill toward the cabin, leaving Lucy just as terrified but unsure if she should run, completely unarmed, into the middle of this and give Flynn another headache about protecting her. Still, though, she can’t stop. She pounds up the creaking clapboard steps after him, ducks into the dim interior, and finds three people all pointing high-velocity automatic weapons at each other. Flynn, scope trained dead on the presumable KGB agent pointing a heavy sidearm at Iris, who in turn has her finger on the trigger of her pistol, daring him to take another step, another _inch,_ in her direction. Lucy skids to a halt, before her presence can set off a round-robin of shots and drop them all on the spot. The KGB agent looks to be in the worst position, what with two angry Flynns teamed up against him, but that sidearm is no joke. One shot can seriously wound Iris, if not kill her, and Lucy is quite sure that there is no way Flynn himself can survive that again.

The silence is absolutely hideous. Nobody stirs, even as the KGB agent’s eyes dart to Lucy, clearly sizing up whether she’s a threat or whether she would make a better target than Iris. He appears briefly stumped when she appears to be exactly what she is, i.e. an unarmed civilian somehow strolling into the middle of a hotspot spy nest in the Kamchatka wilderness, and makes a move as if to swing around on her. Flynn’s free arm flashes out, shielding Lucy, and inviting the KGB agent to do something very, very stupid that will give him full license to shoot. Not that Flynn is ever terribly restrained in this regard, but something is holding him back.

At last, very slowly, the KGB agent lowers his gun. “Easy,” he says, in accented English. It’s hard to place – Slavic, but a Slavic that has been almost, but not quite, polished away with Received Pronunciation. He doesn’t sound Russian, that’s for sure. “Why don’t we talk?”

Flynn freezes.

Both Lucy and Iris stare at him in utter bafflement, but all he does is lower the hunting rifle in turn, which Iris (thankfully) takes as a sign that it’s safe to put away her gun as well. While the likelihood of violent death is thus correspondingly reduced, the atmosphere remains very tense. Flynn is clandestinely trying to get Lucy and Iris behind him, and something different has crossed his face. It’s not just his usual alertness and wariness around an enemy, but something raw, vulnerable, almost – if such a word can be used about Flynn – _frightened._ Lucy stares at him, trying to piece together what on earth could have sparked such a reaction, just as a bolt of realization flashes across Iris’s face as well. She whirls toward her father with a shocked expression, and he nods half an inch, terse and stunned.

Whatever this was, Lucy completely missed it. She tries her best to think. She asked Flynn on the way out if there was a possible reason they ended up here – 1965 Russia, middle of nowhere, but still critically important in the Cold War – and he gave that sort of answer that made her think he knew damn well why, but didn’t feel like sharing. She stares hard at their uninvited guest instead. He’s tall, almost as tall as Flynn, early-to-mid-twenties. Dark hair, parted on the side. Sharp nose, the same kind of statuesquely carved facial features, a hint of unshaven scruff. Lucy has never seen him before, but he’s incredibly familiar. Like a poor man’s copy of a two-decade-younger Flynn, like –

Wait. _Wait._ They’ve encountered his mother, Maria Thompkins, the brilliant young American rocket scientist, fleeing the country after the tragedy of losing her first husband and son. They checked the files after the moon landing mission, when they discovered that Flynn had saved his half-brother Gabriel to make her happy again, that he only remembered her being sad. Lucy can hear Agent Christopher in her head _. Married Asher Flynn, they had a bouncing baby boy._ She doesn’t know anything about Flynn’s father, but from both Garcia and Iris’ stunned reactions, not to mention the resemblance, she is ninety-nine percent sure they have just met him. What a fittingly-Flynn-family reunion, good lord. Thank heavens nobody actually opened fire. Could have wiped them all out of existence on the spot.

“Better,” Asher Flynn – as it clearly is – goes on, when nobody else makes a move to speak. “Now. I am looking for Nikolai Vasilyevich. Do you have any idea where I might find him?”

Something else flashes across Garcia Flynn’s face, too fast for Lucy to follow it, or what he might have decided on. Then he grins. “He’s dead. I killed him last night.”

Lucy thinks this is a horrible strategy even by Flynn’s standards, but it catches Asher by surprise. He opens and shuts his mouth, then scowls at the older man. “And why exactly would you tell me that?”

Flynn shrugs. “You were going to kill him yourself, weren’t you?”

Asher’s hand goes back to his gun, clearly thinking that he might have made a mistake in dropping it so quickly. “What makes you say that?”

“Isn’t it clear? We are on the same side. Both part of the – ” Flynn says something in Russian that neither Lucy nor Iris can understand, some sort of code word, name of an organization, something. “I just got to him before you did.”

Asher stares at him, eyes cold and narrow with suspicion. “I’ve never heard of you.”

“Would you have?”

There is something to be said for that, apparently, but Asher remains on guard. “Nikolai Vasilyevich was my assignment.”

“You should have done your job better. Then they wouldn’t have needed to send me.” Hunting rifle still held casually in his hands, Flynn leans back against the kitchen counter. The air remains taut between them, as Asher frowns. It’s clear that even if he can’t put his finger on it, he knows there’s something uncanny about the other man. “Don’t worry. You can take the credit. Go back and put it on your report, just as you want.”

“And why would you let me do that?” Asher is unconvinced. “You always bring your secretaries with you on a field mission? Though that one – ” he glances at Iris – “is definitely no secretary, and _that_ one – ” he raises an eyebrow at Lucy – “I’d hope was. Be a long and cold train ride back to Moscow otherwise.”

Flynn jerks forward. “Watch your mouth.”

Iris and Lucy glance at each other, edging closer together and preparing to run intervention if this turns any worse – Flynn can’t actually shoot his own father, especially nine years before he himself is born, but he might forget. Likewise, Asher has no idea what is really going on here (for the best). After a moment, however, he masters himself and offers that exact sort of sleek, debonair, dangerous smile that his son does so well, giving Lucy brief vertigo. “My apologies, of course. But you have to understand – especially with the strange machine I found in the woods while I was tracking Vasilyevich – that this is suspicious.”

“What machine?” Flynn snaps.

“Some sort of. . .” Asher catches himself. “I don’t need to tell you.”

“Looked a bit like the flying saucers the Americans claimed crashed at Roswell, 1947? White, blue lights?”

“Yes.”

“That was our machine, you bastard.”

“It was _your_ machine?” Asher Flynn’s tone drips incredulity. “So you leave this in the middle of the woods, then come to kill the dangerous KGB agent I have been tracking for six months, then leave this girl to guard his cabin, then return and tell me you have done it, and are a fellow member, while I have never heard of you? Who _are_ you? Really?”

“I promise,” Flynn says. “You would not believe me if I told you.”

“So you are hiding something.”

“All good spies are, aren’t they?”

There is another tense interval as the Flynn men stare bloody murder at each other. Then Asher says, “I don’t care if Vasilyevich is dead, his network still remains, and I’m not going to trust that you somehow got it to vanish overnight. I have to go to Alaska and make sure none of them got away. If you let me do that without intervention, the machine is yours again. But try to stop me, or tell anyone where I am and what I’m doing, and I will detonate it and expose you.”

“Wait – what?” For the first time, that catches Garcia off guard. “You don’t go to Alaska.”

Asher narrows his eyes again. “What do you mean, I don’t go to Alaska?”

Garcia hesitates. He doesn’t answer immediately, but Lucy thinks she can see the problem. By killing the man that his father was supposed to kill, Flynn has indirectly but significantly altered the trajectory of his father’s life. If Asher Flynn takes on a mission to Alaska that he wasn’t supposed to, he runs the risk of being killed, meeting someone else, or otherwise embarking on an unplanned chain of events that leads him farther and farther away from Maria Thompkins, their meeting and marriage (however unhappy Lucy gets the sense that it was) and their production of Garcia a few years later. If Asher goes now, Flynn doesn’t exist. Lucy is already unsure if she’s back in the present, or not. And if Asher blows up the Mothership in retaliation if they try to stop him, and then tips the entire Soviet Union off about the presence of traitors in their midst and pins the murder of a valuable KGB agent on them –

Yeah. This is bad.

Still, though. Lucy has not endured all the shit she has, just to throw up her hands and quit over the latest stupid situation the man she unfortunately seems to love has now gotten them into. She moves forward. “Excuse me,” she says, with a sweet smile that warns Asher that he calls her a nice companion for a cold train ride again at his peril. “Is there some confusion here?”

“None that I see is your business. Sweetheart.”

Lucy stops short, tilting her head back to gaze into his face (very much like his son’s, but even now, rougher and colder) and baring her teeth in a warning that she might bite his balls off, and not in a way he would enjoy. “I’m American intelligence,” she says. “My partner and I – ” she nods at Iris – “had our own directives on Vasilyevich and his network. They’ll be handled, trust me. I don’t know that we’re going to allow you to just stroll into Alaska after them.”

“What?” Asher scoffs. “They send a couple of American girls out here alone?”

“They’re part of my system,” Flynn says, low and dangerous. “Coincidentally, they can also both kill you.”

Asher raises an eyebrow, but looks back down at Lucy. “CIA? I can’t see it.”

Lucy shrugs. “You think what you want. And if you can’t see me as a spy, because you think I’m just a _secretary,_ my friend here could have put a bullet in your head while you still had your hand down your trousers. Huh?”

Asher opens and shuts his mouth. Flynn coughs. Lucy catches sight out of him, and it’s clear that this is probably the best thing he has ever seen in his life. He’s trying furiously to keep his expression impassive, but not entirely succeeding, and the result is one she feels to the back of her spine. God, the things this man does to her. She’ll get used to it, someday. Maybe.

In any case, however, this is not the time for distraction, as she still has a task at hand. She turns back to Asher. “Right. Here’s what we’re going to do. You are going to go back and report to your superiors that you killed Nikolai Vasilyevich, just as you planned. No need to raise suspicion or make the Politburo – the Presidium,” she corrects herself, remembering that that’s what it is called from 1952-1966 – “wonder exactly who you are or what you’re doing in the country. We’ll handle Vasilyevich’s associates in Alaska. Do you understand me?”

“I don’t understand that I have to take orders from an American bitch who thinks she can –”

Quick as a blink, Flynn moves. He flashes off the counter, grabs Asher’s arm, and twists it into a brutal judo hold behind his back, forcing him to his knees, and kicks the gun away as his father drops it. He snarls something in Russian – no, Lucy thinks it’s Croatian – that doesn’t need a terrible amount of translation.

Asher looks briefly stunned, as obviously he was not expecting to hear any language apart from Russian or English, and certainly not what must be his own native tongue. He starts to sputter what sounds like an indignant question, then stops as Flynn jerks him again, and finally says in English, “Sorry. I am sorry. Please make him let go of me.”

Lucy gives Flynn a look, and he releases Asher, not without a final baleful stare at him. Asher gets up slowly, rubbing his shoulder, and turns back to Lucy. “Can I ask, miss,” he says, with rather pointed courtesy, “why you think this would work, exactly?”

“You can ask.” Lucy’s tone leaves it clear that it isn’t going to get him very far, but hey, gold star for effort. “You don’t want to go to America, though. There’s no guarantee you’d ever get back, and besides. We know who you are. We can make it very difficult for you if you disobey.”

Asher regards her with an expression that reminds her very much of his son. “Do you?”

“Yes.” Lucy smiles demurely. “Asher Flynn.”

That puts an enjoyably shocked expression on his face – as well as a similar one from Garcia, who has evidently not realized that she put the pieces together as to who this is. He also did not know that she knew his father’s name, but they will have to have that conversation later. In the meantime, she has Asher himself on his heels, and she moves to press her advantage. “As I said, this doesn’t have to be difficult. Just do exactly what you were going to do. Vasilyevich is dead, isn’t he? It doesn’t matter how he got this way.”

Asher is clearly still not buying this, but he is also painfully aware that he can’t push too hard. Actually killing KGB agents on Russian territory, while pretending to be Russian himself, puts him in line for about the most unpleasant fate one can imagine – if nothing else, you have to admire his moxie. Must also run in the family. He can’t be sure if they’re double or even triple-crossing him, who they’re reporting to or how they know his true identity (since “estranged son from the future, his somehow-resurrected daughter, and the woman he’s sort-of-maybe-with  after they crashed through time together” doesn’t exactly occur to most people as an explanation). After a final moment, he blows out an angry breath. “Fine.”

“Good.” Lucy smiles. “See?”

He eyes them bitterly,  not bothering to ask if he can trust them. Then he says to Flynn, “The girl drives a hard bargain.”

“The woman, you miserable fuck,” Flynn says, not turning a hair. “And yes, she does.”

Asher snorts. “Still, though,” he remarks. “You will want me to undo my explosives, yes?”

“What?” Sensing trouble, Flynn tenses. “What explosives?”

“The ones I left on your device. You don’t think I was just going to leave an unknown entity sitting by itself in the woods, to do whatever it wanted? I rigged up an explosive and I still have the trigger. It’s a ways from here, yes, but it could go off. We could try it.”

“Don’t – ” Flynn looks thoroughly exasperated, but despite the obvious calamity that it would be if Asher destroyed the Mothership, Lucy has to bite her lip hard. Flynn is finally learning exactly what it is like to deal with himself. “Don’t blow it up, you idiot!”

“Why not? What’s in it for me?”

“That was covered under the part of you going back and telling your superiors that you completed the hit on Vasilyevich successfully. We’ll take the machine and never be seen anywhere near here again, I promise. Never complicate your life again. Yet.” He snorts.

“Yet?” Asher demands.

“Never mind. Inside joke. Very well, then. You can go outside, I’ll show you where I buried Vasilyevich, you can confirm for yourself that it is the man and take anything you need as proof of his demise. Then we return to our machine, you take the explosives off, and we leave. So simple, even you can understand it. Yes?”

Asher folds his arms. Finally, he nods once.

“Good.” Flynn takes the hunting rifle and gestures curtly at his father, as Iris immediately moves forward – she is clearly not letting them go alone, in case Asher tries to overpower Garcia and run. Lucy doesn’t really want to be left behind in the cabin, and figures the Flynns could use some adult supervision, so she follows them out through the grove and to the place where Flynn buried Nikolai earlier. The men brusquely disinter the corpse, which is not the most pleasant of sights by now, and Lucy swallows hard, looking away. Asher takes some black-and-white photographs out of his pocket, checks them against the mottled face, and examines the ID card Flynn hands him, as well as a few folded carbon-paper documents in Russian. Then he nods again. “Fine. It’s him.”

They rebury Nikolai (if there are such thing as ghosts, this place will have the shit haunted out of it, making Lucy wonder if it will feature in another spooky story about the Russian backwoods, maybe the unexplained disappearance of some hikers in a few years). She would rather not think about that, though, and follows the three Flynns back to the path. A quick stop at the cabin to make sure they have everything, and they start the tramp back toward the Mothership. Garcia and Iris are keeping a very close eye on Asher. A man backed into a corner, especially a Flynn, is going to have some dangerous stunt up his sleeve to get out of it.

Conversation is minimal while they trek through the trees. Then Asher, curiosity having evidently finally gotten the better of him,  says, “Do I know you from somewhere?”

Flynn grunts. “Not really.”

“Are you. . .” Asher considers him for a long moment, gaze flicking between the older man’s face and his own, noting the striking similarity. “Did you ever know a Katja? Katja Elena Kovačić? It would have been early in 1941. Near Jasenovac, in Slavonia.”

Something passes over Flynn’s face at that, which Lucy and Asher both notice. The latter stops. “Well?” he demands, voice rough. “Do you?”

“You think I’m your father.” Flynn turns toward him. “Katja Kovačić is your mother, isn’t she?”

Asher doesn’t bother to ask how he worked that out. “Yes. All she ever said about my father was that he was a Red Army man. She thought he died in Stalingrad. But if you – ”

“I’m not your father,” Flynn interrupts. “I’ve never met Katja Kovačić.”

Asher eyes him mulishly. He said his parents met in 1941 – as it’s 1965 now, he can’t be older than twenty-four, an angry young man working in a terribly dangerous occupation, deep behind enemy lines, exacting revenge one by one on all the Russians who could have been his father, and could have been the one to leave him behind, to never even bother to know that he existed. It would have certainly been easier, in such a case, to believe that the man died heroically in battle, rather than that he simply didn’t give a shit. Lucy’s heart goes out to him, even as she begins to grasp just how deep the legacy of damage and abandonment in this family actually runs. No wonder this man couldn’t be a good father to Garcia. No wonder Garcia himself has tried so hard, and so terribly, not to fail Iris the same way.

“I think  you’re a liar,” Asher says at last, turning as if about to square up for a fistfight. “I think you do know her. I saw you recognized the name.”

“There are a lot of Katjas in Slavonia. I doubt it was your mother.”

“LIAR!” It rings through the trees, Asher’s face turning red, his eyes burning black. It is truly terrifying, and Lucy stops abruptly, reaching for Iris, still having that old impulse to shield the child from this. She can also imagine young Garcia watching this rage turned against his mother, trying to protect her, even as a small boy. “YOU KNOW HER!”

Flynn stares at him, white to the lips. Even though he’s two decades older than his father, even though he’s the grownup here, it’s clear that he’s terrified. That he’s still the little boy who wanted to be Asher, wanted his power, and feared him more than anything. He tries to answer, and can’t.

“Did you?” Asher demands, when the silence hangs like a shroud. “Just tell me! Did you even know she had a son? Did you know she never even wanted me? Just another useless piece of garbage the Russians left behind? Did you ever think about her? Ever again? _Us?”_

Flynn remains rooted to the spot. His mouth opens and shuts, and he raises a hand as if to run it through his hair, then drops it. Lucy doesn’t know what on earth he can do – he can’t shoot his father, which is his usual method of fixing things, and he is stunned at the force of this rage and grief. Of knowing that his father was failed before he ever got around to failing him, that it’s gone on, over and over. As Lucy and Iris watch in tense silence, they can see the knowledge, the tragedy, the weight of it settle on him. And they see him make a decision.

“You’re right,” Flynn says. “I knew your mother. Katja Kovačić, 1941, Jasenovac. She tried to break the Jews and Serbs out of the camp, get them away from the Nazis. We were together for a night, that is all. My name is Andrei Ivanovich Sokolov. I was a soldier in the Red Army. And I suppose that. . . that makes me your father.”

Asher opens and shuts his mouth. He seems to both feel vindicated and more stunned than ever. Finally, he manages a curt nod. “She – named me Aleksandr.”

“I had a brother named that,” Flynn says. “He died soon before I met your mother. I – I talked about him to her. It was what drew us together.”

“Did you?” Asher asks. Not wanting to hear the answer, but hungry for it. “Know about me?”

“No,” Flynn says. “She never wrote to me, I never heard anything, I never saw her again. It was war, people had to cling to each other while they could and then expect to lose them. I am sorry, Aleksandr. I am so sorry. I would have come back, I would have found you, if I’d known.”

Asher’s chin wobbles, despite his clear desperation to keep his composure. Somewhat less vehemently, he says, “You left me.”

“I’m sorry,” Flynn says again. He clearly doesn’t need to fake the brightness in his eyes, the unsteadiness of his own voice. “I know you cannot forgive me. I could never forgive my own father. He – he was there, but he wasn’t _there._ He was not a. . .” He hesitates. “Not a good man.”

Asher absorbs this, clenching his fists. He takes half a step, then stops, head down, shoulders crunched. Flynn takes a step as well, meeting him halfway. Quietly, he holds out his arms.

Asher hesitates for a moment more, determined not to break, not to let it go, to keep the fire burning, to take comfort from his rage. But he can’t. He takes an unsteady step, then another. Then practically runs the last few steps to Flynn, clutches him, and silently breaks down.

Flynn doesn’t say a word, eyes closed, holding Asher tightly as he weeps without a sound. Lucy and Iris don’t say a word either, Lucy swallowing back her own tears, unable to believe what she has just seen take place with her own two eyes. She has never been so desperately, painfully, blazingly proud of Garcia Flynn in her entire life, and she reaches out for Iris’ hand, not quite looking, hoping that perhaps there is some forgiveness for her as well. She thinks of coming out to find father and daughter asleep on the couch as she looks at Garcia and Asher, as they sway on the spot and Garcia continues to mutter the same small nothings. Taking on the guilt for his grandfather, banishing their sin, as best he can despite all his own damage. Lucy almost can’t breathe. She can’t turn away. All she can think is that yes, this is it, this is him. This, despite his cracks and catastrophes and countless misadventures along the way, is the man she loves.

At last, belatedly, Asher gets hold of himself, wiping his eyes with the back of his hand. He gives Flynn’s arm a rough pat, as if ashamed for breaking down on him, and sucks a breath. “We should,” he says. “We should keep going.”

“Yes, we should.” Flynn glances at him. “You know I have to go again, don’t you? I can’t stay.”

Asher glances between him and Iris. “Is this. . .” He pauses. “Is this my sister? My half-sister?”

“Yes. My daughter Irina.” Flynn makes a small gesture, and Iris steps forward. “This is. . . well, this is your half-brother, Aleksandr.”

Iris and Asher look each other up and down, as Asher seems vaguely embarrassed. “I am sorry. For what I said about you earlier. It was not gentlemanly.”

“You have time. You can change.” Iris smiles wryly. She is twenty-three, and her grandfather is barely a year older. They do indeed look like siblings, as they shake hands, then hug quickly, exchanging the customary air kisses on each cheek. “This is my father’s wife, Lucy.”

Both Flynn and Lucy are quite stunned by this introduction – even though Lucy of course has been pretending to be Mrs. Flynn ever since the days of Fort McHenry in 1814, which Iris was the one to challenge her about. She manages to look as if yes, this is true, and steps forward. “I, ah, I suppose that makes me your stepmother?”

Asher shakes her hand as well. “I’m sorry for calling you an American bitch.”

“It’s all right.” Lucy laughs dryly. “I’ve heard worse.”

They continue to walk, though not in silence this time. Flynn tells Asher everything he knows (or rather, has invented) about Andrei Ivanovich Sokolov’s life: his parents, where he is from in Russia, what he likes, who he is. By the time they reach the Mothership, as dusk is starting to fall through the trees, Asher is clearly dragging his feet so they will have more time together. “Do you have to go?” he says again. “You could come with me. You could.”

“I can’t.” Flynn turns to him. “Not now. But we will see each other again some day, I promise. In the meantime, I think you’ll probably get married. Have a son too. Just do better by him than I did by you.”

Asher nods tremulously. They look at each other for a long moment, and then Flynn releases him. “Go undo the explosives, you asshole.”

Asher swallows, then turns and scuttles off to the dynamite he has indeed rigged quite thoroughly to the Mothership – trust a Flynn to not half-ass the task of blowing shit up. Flynn himself lets out a gasp, and Lucy reaches for his hand, as he squeezes hard enough to grind her bones together. Asher works carefully as Lucy holds her breath – an inadvertent explosion to wipe Flynn’s father out of existence would be literally murderously ironic, if not at all helpful. But he gets them off, moves them to whatever hidden cache he took them from, and returns to survey the Mothership curiously. “What on earth is this thing? It is completely bizarre.”

“It’s a. . . weather balloon.” Flynn manages a grin. “As I said, we have to get back and report, and we have other postings. But I’d stay if I could. Believe me on that. Okay?”

“Okay.” Asher pauses, then nods. “It’s funny, isn’t it? That we could somehow both end up here? Chasing after the same man?”

“You have no idea.” Flynn nods to Iris, who heads inside the Mothership, and turns back to Asher. It’s clear that if he’s going to, this is his last chance to punch him, to shout at him, to accuse him of all the things he didn’t do for him, all the scars he left in him. But he doesn’t. Instead he steps forward, takes his young father’s face in his hands, and kisses him on the forehead. _“Volim te, Aleksandr.”_

Asher Flynn looks at him with all the hunger and grief and love in the world. _“I ja tebe volim, Tata.”_

They remain there for another moment, and then Flynn lets him go with a gentle push, turns him around. “It’s classified,” he says. “You can’t see how this thing works. Go, keep going. Go back and live your life. I hope you’re not as angry. Remember this. Remember me.”

“I will.” Asher gulps and nods. He looks agonizingly young. “I will, Tata.”

With that, finally, he steps back, turns, and starts to walk. Flynn, Lucy, and Iris watch him disappear among the twilight trees without a word, until his shadow has become indistinguishable from them, until he is out of sight. Then Flynn’s legs give out, and he has to sit down on the top step, rubbing his hands over his face, shaking without a sound. Lucy and Iris crouch next to him on either side, putting their arms over his shoulders. Then Lucy says quietly, “Is there any chance he’ll ever find out it’s not true?”

“I don’t think so.” Flynn’s voice is rusty. “Katja Kovačić – my grandmother – died in 1962. He doesn’t speak to George Flynn – his stepfather – and I doubt Katja ever told him the name of the man who fathered her illegitimate child from a one-night stand during the war. She’s the only person who would know otherwise, and as I said, she’s dead. So no. He will live believing that his father’s name was Andrei Ivanovich Sokolov, and that he met him in Russia in 1965, and that his father wanted him and would have come back for him if he could. I hope that gives him some peace, some ease. I hope he’s kinder, when he marries my mother. When he raises me.”

Lucy is taken aback. “You just made all of that up? About your grandfather? Even his name?"

“Yes,” Flynn says. “The man probably did die in Stalingrad. Never knew he had a son, probably never cared. But that doesn’t matter. Asher will never know otherwise.”

Lucy heaves out a slow sigh. Finally, she leans over and quietly, simply kisses his cheek, once and then again. She wants to tell him how proud of him she is, how very, very, unbearably proud. Finally, she says only, “See. There are other ways to fix things than burning them down.”

Flynn blows out a breath. Then he pulls himself together and rises crisply to his feet, knuckling his hand over his eyes. “Okay. Let’s get the hell out of here.”

They head to the console, as Iris powers it on and runs diagnostics and reboot protocols. They are still surprised, however, when something pings. She bends over it, and frowns. “There is a cached message. From someone named Carlin.”

“Open it.” Lucy’s stomach swoops. “That’s Rufus. Remember him?”

Iris looks at her warily – she was only a child with the time team, so long ago – but nods. “Yes. He says he has gotten the Lifeboat online, and retrieved Wyatt. They’re together. They have sent a notice for us to meet them in Gibraltar, December 17, 1872. What’s that?”

“That. . .” Lucy has to think a moment. “Those are the start of the salvage hearings for the _Mary Celeste,_ the most famous abandoned ship in history. She was found adrift off the Azores Islands by the Canadian brigantine _Dei Gratia,_ perfectly seaworthy with all her supplies still aboard, but her lifeboat and her crew missing. Nobody ever figured out what happened to them. There have been all kinds of theories down the centuries, but – ”

“Rittenhouse,” Flynn says immediately. “Rittenhouse has something to do with it. Smuggling something, or worse. So either John survived when – when he was shot in Salem, or they got even stronger as a result. They had the Mothership for a while. They could have taken the prototype for their own working time machine.”

Lucy nods grimly, desperately relieved to hear that Wyatt made it out of 1829 and that he and Rufus are waiting for them, but afraid of what must await in 1872. “Iris, can you get us there?”

“I think so.” Iris draws a quick, bracing breath. “Strap in.”

They do so, Lucy devoutly hoping that Asher remembered all the dynamite he stuck in various bits – they likewise do not need to suddenly turn into a fireball when they try to launch. Lucy swallows her stomach out of her mouth, as it likewise remembers what happened the last time they were in this damn thing, and hopes that their trip backward is at least somewhat smoother than their trip forward. She pushes away the pang she feels at once more leaving the twentieth century, getting further away from home. At this rate, it seems as if she’s never getting back.

One thing they do have this time is, well, time, which they did not have when busting ass out of Salem at high speed, and Iris makes sure to check everything thoroughly. She appears to decide that everything is in order, and nods. “All right. Hang on.”

One innards-rattling go-round later, which isn’t quite as bad as the first one but still leaves Lucy (and even Flynn himself) rather green, they whirl back into existence and skid hard, tumbling and clanking to a halt before they check the specs. Iris has managed to get them in the vicinity, but she still can’t jump as precisely as Rufus, and according to the computer, it is December _13_ , 1872. (At least they are, however, in Gibraltar.) That means they have four days before Wyatt and Rufus arrive here, and once they have concealed the Mothership, not wanting to take a chance with any more dynamite anywhere near it, they make their way cautiously down. Gibraltar in this era is a bustling international port and British Royal Navy base, the massive Rock rising out of the winter mist and the masts of ships anchored at the quays piercing it like skeletal fingers. If Lucy is right, the _Mary Celeste_ herself just arrived this morning, sailed by the shorthanded crew of the _Dei Gratia,_ and she briefly wonders if they can make it down to the docks and sneak aboard for a look. That, however, would probably be a bad idea. No, it definitely would, and they need to work out what the hell is going on with Rittenhouse first.

For that matter, they also need to blend in, as none of them have changed their clothes since Salem and after two expeditions through the Siberian wilderness to boot, they are already getting funny looks from Gibraltar’s well-dressed patricians strolling the palm-treed promenades. They also don’t have money, especially not of the local variety, which is a further complication. Flynn insists that they just let him mug someone, which Lucy flatly shoots down, but she has to sigh and pretend to look the other way when he swipes an unguarded purse from the docklands. It’s not enough to buy them all new clothes, and ready-to-wear stuff from, say, Target or Primark does not really exist here anyway. In the meantime, they buy a room in a more or less reputable boarding house. Lucy has spent a lot of time in nineteenth-century boarding houses recently. She can safely say that she has seen enough of them for a lifetime.

Iris heads out by herself, despite their protests, to start prospecting for information. After the door shuts behind her, neither Lucy nor Flynn speak for a long moment. Then at last Lucy says quietly, “What you did for your father, back there. . . I think that was the most admirable thing you’ve ever done.”

“Not many other candidates for the title?” Flynn grins, without particular merriment. He sits on the bed, as she pauses, then comes over to perch next to him. “I. . . I don’t know why. I wanted to shout at the bastard, about everything he did to me. I wanted to tell him who I really was, everything he did to me and my mother. How angry I was. I. . .” He trails off. “I could have.”

“Yes, you could have,” Lucy says, still quietly. Her hand finds his again, their cold fingers interlocking on the worn quilt. “But you didn’t.”

“It was different,” Flynn says, eyes fixed on the far wall. “Seeing him like that, a boy who was angry at his own father for failing him. I wasn’t expecting that.”

“You tried to stop the cycle, though.” Lucy brushes a strand of dark hair behind his ear. He could use a trim; he’s getting a bit shaggy. “With Iris, and then with him. You only ever knew your father as a man, a flawed one. Of course you weren’t ready to see him like this. To see yourself.”

Flynn shudders, but doesn’t answer. Lucy lets her hand slide to the back of his neck, turning him toward her, letting their foreheads rest against each other. His own hand comes up her arm, his thumb touching her chin, as their mouths open. He whispers, “Lucy – ”

“Shh.” She brushes the backs of her fingers over his unshaven jaw, and kisses him.

For a long moment, there’s nothing but that, but them, hands cradling each other’s heads, pulling each other closer, hungry and tender and devouring, something familiar now, comforting. But when Flynn tries to break the kiss, to explore down her neck and lower, Lucy won’t let him. Holds him off, the way he tends to do with her, and whispers again, “Shh.”

She can feel the tension in his entire body as she starts to unbutton his shirt, taking her time about it, nipping at the pulse point in the hollow of his throat, brushing her lips over the broad plane of his shoulder and the sharp cut of his collarbone, the muscle of his chest and the rough peak of his nipple. Kisses, licks, bites just hard enough to make him draw in his breath with a hiss, and pushes him onto his back, hiking up her skirts and climbing atop him. He reaches for her again, but she catches his wrists in her hands, stopping him from touching her. “Trust me.” She catches his earlobe between her teeth. “Trust me, Garcia.”

He swears under his breath, practically vibrating with the struggle not to pull loose and assert control again, to touch her, to not let his own guard down. His pulse is visibly hammering, the cords on his neck standing out. It must have been since Lorena, since he allowed someone to hold him in their hands like this and give them the power, the possibility, of crushing him to dust. He hasn’t been with anyone else in the meantime. Only his wife, and now Lucy. This is like it was earlier, when the change was felt, experienced, sealed. This, word unspoken, is a vow.

Lucy makes her way slowly down his chest, to the trim, dark line of hair that climbs his stomach. Reaches for his belt and undoes it, sliding his trousers down over his hips. Draws him out, already half-hard in her hand, and gets him the rest of the way with a few quick strokes of her thumb. Kisses him lightly in the cut of thigh and groin, then muses her way across, moving her way down the shaft, and takes the tip lightly, wetly into her mouth.

Flynn hisses again, making a grab for her, as Lucy once more knocks his hand away. She licks a slow, deliberate circle, tasting him salty on her tongue, and sets to her work. This isn’t the first time she’s done this for him, as she did it back in 1829 after she’d patched him up from his wounds, but it’s still different, daring, a challenge and a question. He is clearly losing his mind with the effort not to grab at her, roll her over and take her hard, to knock all the dominoes over and burn the two of them down. Yet still,  almost desperately, he holds himself in check.

Lucy sucks him hilt-deep, drags her lips back down, lets him have a brief respite, and then returns to her work with renewed purpose. Until he’s trembling like a blown horse beneath her, jerking against the bed with the effort not to thrust into her mouth, and she finally lets him have what he needs, what she needs. Slides up on him as his hands claw loose, grip her thighs, spread them almost roughly, and he enters her with a single swift, hard shove, practically to the back of her throat. She gasps, settles him more squarely between her thighs, and gives herself to him in turn. He has done it, he has trusted her. Now, therefore, she does it for him.

Flynn fills her with intent, insistent thrusts, slick and sweet, as she claws at his shoulder for purchase and rubs against him still harder, urging him to take what he needs. Their mouths stay open, rasping and musing in short, hitching gasps, as his hands move to her hips and almost crush her into him, over and over, nearly hard enough to bruise. Her head tilts back, baring her throat and chest to his mouth, as he presses kisses into her like burning stars. _You have married an Icarus,_ Lucy thinks, writhing, riding, rising. _He has flown too close to the sun._

It doesn’t take much longer after that for them to spin and jerk and spill into release, gasping and clutching, entangled and unmade. It’s funny, how this has now happened enough for Lucy to not be quite sure what time this is, and yet she still feels as starving and insatiable as if they’ve barely begun. She needs him, she _needs_ him, it seems stranger when he’s outside her than when he’s in. They have become twisted and woven and bound together beyond all ordinary sense or description, even for two people sleeping with each other on a fairly (rather, very) consistent basis. She’s no longer quite whole when they’re not.

At last, Flynn grunts and shifts, sliding out of her, as their breathing remains harsh and heavy. Then he turns his head and kisses her, somewhat more gently, carding his fingers through the tangled knot of her hair. It is some time after that until either of them quite want to let go, and they move apart reluctantly, reconstituting their clothing. Iris will be back soon, anyway. Much as she might have come around to tacitly approving their relationship, she doubtless is not interested in having the proof flaunted in her face.

Sure enough, in another fifteen minutes or so, there’s a knock on the door, and Lucy goes to open it. “Iris? Come in, we – ”

And at that, she stops.

“Good to see you again, Lucy.” Emma Whitmore smiles. “Finally. It’s only been a hundred and eighty years.”


	12. Chapter 12

**xvi.**

If Wyatt had more time to think this over, he is fairly sure that he would not have stolen a Royal Navy lieutenant’s uniform, especially one that is several sizes too small for him (he’s not the world’s biggest guy, but who was wearing this, Mighty Mouse?) They needed to get into the Gibraltar docks and try to find the abandoned _Mary Celeste_ without raising suspicion, but the downside of Wyatt’s brilliant disguise is that people keep stopping him and either asking for information or expecting him to know what’s going on. Wyatt’s British accent may be a step up from Dick Van Dyke in _Mary Poppins,_ but it’s still not great – not to mention he does not have a blessed clue which Navy ships are currently stationed here, and thus no idea which one to pretend to be from. Great. He was trying to be clandestine, but he might as well have hired a plane with a banner to announce that there are impostors among them. Also, it would really help if Rufus would quit snickering.

“Shut up,” Wyatt growls, after their fourth questionable encounter has left the longshoreman squinting over his shoulder suspiciously as they try to walk at a brisk, ordinary pace away. “This is not as easy as it looks. You wanna trade?”

“Yeah,” Rufus says. “Because the British Empire, at the height of colonialism and Darkest Africa and whatever else, is _really_ going to buy that I’m a lieutenant in the Royal Navy. Guess you’re just going to have to keep it up, Officer Wedgie.”

Wyatt glares at him, while resisting the urge to pick the white canvas trousers out of where they have gotten uncomfortably bunched up, yet again. He is relieved, to say the least, that he wasn’t permanently stuck in 1829 and that he’s managed to recover Rufus, that they have some idea of where Rittenhouse ended up, and that they might even manage to see Lucy and Flynn again one of these centuries. Their outlook, however, is not terribly promising. Rufus has reported that the altered history and the CSA still exist in 2017, there’s not any record of Lucy ever being born, and that all their efforts to date still have not succeeded in restoring her. He could, he suggested doubtfully, try some massively theoretical override, go to 1983, the year of Lucy’s birth, and patch in the evidence of her existence to see if it takes, like a software programmer trying a complicated hack on a bit of malfunctioning code. But as Lucy’s life depends on whatever they figure out, Wyatt doesn’t want to go for that kind of Hail Mary unless it’s absolutely necessary. He can’t lose Lucy, or Rufus. Hell, he doesn’t even want to lose Flynn. God knows when that happened.

At last, they manage to talk their way into the salvage yard, after having Wyatt remove the jacket and pretend to be Canadian since he sounds far more Canadian than he does British, and because the Canadian ship, the _Dei Gratia,_ was the one to bring the _Mary Celeste_ in. The _Mary Celeste_ herself, not looking like one of the most famous nautical mysteries of all time, is anchored at the end of the quay. She is a mid-sized, two-masted brig, and going from what little Wyatt scraped off Wikipedia before leaving the present, nobody ever figures out what happened to her crew. The Gibraltar salvage board thought the captain of the _Dei Gratia_ had killed them, or deliberately wrecked them, or was trying to defraud them somehow, but none of that stood up with evidence. The passengers remain gone for good, their abandonment of a perfectly seaworthy ship never explained. And while all kinds of theories have been proposed over the years, from the mundane to the ridiculous, Wyatt has a feeling that the answer to this begins and ends with one word. _Rittenhouse._

Looking as casual as possible, he and Rufus make their way down the docks. The ship is being guarded by a pair of bored soldiers, who nonetheless give the boys the fish eye as they approach. Word of the mystery is getting around, and these must not be their first looky-loos. “Step along, you two.”

“Actually,” Wyatt says. “I’m with the Canadian Navy. _Dei Gratia_ is under our flag, I need to ask a few questions, take a brief inspection.”

The man stares at him suspiciously. “There’s no Canadian Navy.”

Wyatt curses under his breath – this is why Lucy is the historian, not him. He knows there definitely is a Canadian Navy _now,_ because he had a friend who served in it, but apparently it hasn’t been founded yet. Still, whenever caught in a lie, the wise thing to do is always to lie harder. He cocks his head and stares angrily at the man. “Excuse me? I’m off the HMCS _Nova Scotia,_ we’re anchored up the coast in Malaga. A messenger was sent up to me once the _Dei Gratia_ brought her in. You want me to go back to my captain and tell him you’re impeding me from carrying out my job?”

Despite himself, the soldier is caught on the hop. “Who’s your captain?”

“Timothy Horton.” Wyatt folds his arms. “You really want me to bring him down here? I’m sure he’s going to be very entertained that you’ve been wasting my time and obstructing the inquiry, so…”

The soldiers exchange a glance, look at Wyatt’s uniform, and as ever, take no account of Rufus at all. Finally, grudgingly, they stand aside. “Ten minutes.”

“Thank you, sir.” Wyatt snaps a sarcastic salute and strides past them, Rufus hurrying after, as they make their way up to the gangplank and over the side to the _Mary Celeste’s_ deck. The soldiers are still watching them, so Wyatt has to make a show of taking notes and jotting down quick sketches. Finally, they manage to get below, into the empty cabin, sunlight slanting on the floor. As they stare around, Wyatt says, “You have any idea?”

“Nope.” Rufus shakes his head, lips grim. “But I’ve been thinking. This happened in history, right? Our history. Before Rittenhouse had their hands on a time machine. They could be involved somehow, but… I’m guessing that for whatever reason, they wanted to stop the _Mary Celeste_ from being abandoned and for it to complete its journey. Which means there was something, or someone, they wanted to survive the trip. Some secret Rittenhouse member on the crew?”

“No idea.” Wyatt pauses, then reaches for the captain’s logs. “Far as I know, everything seemed fine. That was why it was such a big deal when they vanished. But you may be on to something, and I don’t have any other place to start. So…”

With that, he pulls down the nearest book, flips it open, and starts going through it, while Rufus cocks a nervous eye at the door, listening for thumps or interruptions from outside. It gives Wyatt a headache to read so much elaborate nineteenth-century cursive, but at least he had practice during his extended layover in 1829. Finally he says, “Okay. The captain is – was – Benjamin Briggs, he seems clean. Total straight arrow. But the majority owner of the ship is a James H. Winchester, and I swear that name sounds familiar. The first mate is married to his niece, and he recommended the steward. Dammit, _why_ isn’t Lucy here?”

“Winchester?” Rufus looks at him oddly. “Any connection to that crazy mystery house in California? The one built by the widow of the rifle guy?”

“I don’t think so. Unless they’re cousins or something.” Wyatt blows out a frustrated breath. “If we had Google, we could look this up in five minutes, but we’re stuck, what, card cataloguing it? Actually, even that is probably too generous. Hold on. Let me see when Winchester bought her. Uh… 1869, I think. So three years ago.”

“Look, with a name like Winchester, that’s got to be important,” Rufus says. “Anything you can think of? You’re the one who’s the gun expert around here.”

Wyatt wracks his brains. “There was – I think – a James Winchester who was in the Revolutionary War, and a general in the war of 1812. He knew Andrew Jackson, they founded Memphis, Tennessee together. He died a while ago, though, this can’t be him.”

“Well, that’s a bunch of hot spots together,” Rufus says slowly. “Served in the Revolution. Was also in the war of 1812, which is where – in 1814 – things got messed up for us in the present. Knew Andrew Jackson, in whose administration you spent a bunch of time recently, and Jackson was major Rittenhouse. All of that means this Winchester dude was _absolutely_ Rittenhouse too. Probably fairly high up. If this James Winchester is his son or his grandson, I’m guessing he was using the _Mary Celeste_ to run his evil little secret society errands. The crew probably didn’t know. But what if Captain Briggs – you said he was a straight arrow, right? What if Briggs found out? What if Winchester gave him some kind of secret money or letter or whatever else that had to get to his Rittenhouse contacts in Europe, Briggs read it, and flipped a shit. Realized what he’d been doing all this time. And knew that the only way to save himself, his family – his wife and baby daughter were with him, right? – and his crew from Rittenhouse, and make sure they never got the secret, was to…”

“Disappear,” Wyatt finishes with him, heart suddenly pounding. “Rufus, you’re a god damn genius.”

Rufus shrugs, looking somewhat abashed. “We don’t know that it’s true.”

“No, but that makes a _hell_ of a lot of sense.” Wyatt blows out another breath. “That’s got to be what Rittenhouse wants. Benjamin Briggs and the crew disappeared with whatever important secret or artifact he was supposed to deliver, and they want it back. They don’t know exactly when Briggs and company abandoned ship, or where they’d be, so they have to come to the salvage hearings and try to work it out in reverse. If there’s a chance he’s still out there floating on the ocean somewhere, they can head off and pick him up.”

“What is it?” Rufus asks. “Whatever Briggs has that they want?”

“Could be anything,” Wyatt says grimly. “Money, or the secret to how to succeed in business without really trying, or something else that would make it easier for them to do what they do. But whatever it is, they want it. So yeah. We have to make sure they don’t get it.”

“Any chance we’re going to run into Lucy and Flynn?” Rufus glances away sharply as there’s a loud creak from outside. It could just be the ship rocking at anchor, or it could be someone coming on board. “I sent a message for them to join us here, but given how fiddly the connection between the Mothership and the Lifeboat is, I don’t even know when they are, or if they got it. There wasn’t any record of a Lucy Preston being killed at Salem, so I think they got out of there, but I have no idea if they then – ”

There’s another creak. Louder.

“Wyatt,” Rufus says tensely. “I think we have company.”

“Yeah, just…” Wyatt flips even more frenetically through the pages, as if he’s going to wring one more drop of information out of this blasted book. “Hold on, just – ”

“WYATT!”

“Okay!” Wyatt drops the log and grabs the sidearm concealed (with difficulty) beneath his waistcoat, hoping he doesn’t rip all the seams at once. He beckons for Rufus to get behind him, and Rufus dives into a pile of burlap sacks. The cabin door opens, Wyatt’s finger tightens on the trigger, and –

“Don’t!” a voice yells frantically. A very familiar voice. “Don’t shoot!”

Wyatt and Rufus’ hearts stop at the same time.

_“Lucy?”_

* * *

 It has not been (it should be normal by now, and yet) the most outstanding few days of Lucy Preston’s life.

“How did you – ” That was her first question when she opened the door and came face to face with Emma Whitmore. Logically, there is no way Rittenhouse should be here. If Wyatt and Rufus have the Lifeboat, and Lucy, Flynn, and Iris have the Mothership, that leaves no extra time machines for Emma and her gang to use. They should have (they _should_ have, and yet by now, Lucy has learned over and over the danger of underestimating these people) been stranded in Salem, maybe burned as witches themselves for that final, signature touch of irony. The only thing she can think of – that lurches horribly to mind and has to be forced away – is that this was some kind of long con on Iris’ part after all, that after she took Lucy and Flynn here, she went out, hopped back in the Mothership, returned to Salem, picked up the Rittencrew, and ferried them back. No, though. That’s not what happened. There are other, far easier ways to do that, and Iris wasn’t feigning. Not after everything that happened with her father and grandfather and Lucy. She didn’t.

“How did you get here?” Lucy repeats, somewhat more in control of herself after the initial shock. She feels Flynn’s hand close on her arm like a vise, trying to put her behind him, but she doesn’t move. “What do you want?”

Emma’s eyes flick between them, both still in a certain state of dishabille. She appears amused. “It wasn’t to ask for a three-way, believe me. As for how I got here, that’s action item number one. We had to build a mostly functional prototype to train Iris in, and while I had the Mothership, we copied out a basic software clone. It was good for about… two jumps, maybe. Last resort backup plan. After you pulled that fun trick in Salem, we sent the emergency signal, and headed out here. So. We _will_ want the Mothership back.”

“Good luck with that,” Flynn says harshly. “Is Rittenhouse dead?”

Emma flinches, ever so slightly. “John? Yes. He’s dead. Your charming daughter killed him.”

“Because you taught her how to be a killer!” Flynn’s shout makes the fragile floorboards quake. If Lucy relaxed her grip the merest fraction, he would probably tear Emma’s throat out with his bare hands. “Because you – ”

“Please,” Emma says dismissively. “Like you would have taught her any different? It’s all you know how to do.”

Flynn goes quite still, even as Lucy, thinking of him back with Asher in Russia, holds tighter. “Is there a point to this?” she says harshly. “Did you just come to gloat and think we’d somehow be persuaded to hand the Mothership back as a result?”

“Not really.” Emma shrugs. “You see, Lucy, now that John’s dead, I’m the de facto leader of Rittenhouse’s operational arm. And I’m _not_ going to fall for your – charms? You aren’t going to convince me that you want to join us, because I know you don’t. But you _are_ going to work with us, one way or another.  So let’s make it simple. You do what we want, or Iris dies.”

Lucy jerks. So does Flynn. “What?”

“Simple, really.” Emma is clearly enjoying this, revealing information bit by bit, baiting the hook, stringing them along. The woman is pathological. “We’re going to run a quick errand in the Mothership, and retrieve something that Benjamin Briggs tried to steal from us. Then you’re going to uninstall whatever program Carlin put into it, the remote override, and anything else that could mess it up. _Then_ you’re going to give it back to us. I assume your boy band backups will be here soon, so three of you can take a ride back to the present in the Lifeboat, if you really want to go. The other two will stay behind with us, hostages for your good behavior. Do all that, and we’ll let Iris go. Otherwise, she dies, and so do all of you.”

“You – ” Flynn takes a step, pulling Lucy with him. “You have my daughter?”

“Of course we do.” Emma sounds bored. “I wouldn’t come here to threaten you if we didn’t. She’s only Rittenhouse’s most wanted fugitive after what she did to John in Salem, so the circumstances of her confinement aren’t exactly pleasant. Here.” She takes some Polaroid photographs out of her pocket and shoves them at Flynn. “Have a look.”

Flynn’s fingers suddenly don’t seem to work, and Lucy grabs his hand to steady them. She doesn’t want to look at the pictures either, even as the images burn themselves unavoidably into her eyes. Iris bound and gagged, hair down and eyes furious, surrounded by a bunch of Rittengoons smiling and giving the thumbs up to the camera like big-game hunters who have just brought down an endangered rhino in Africa. It looks as if she’s had at least one beating. Clearly, they wasted no time at all in snatching her when she, Lucy, and Flynn got here to Gibraltar. Iris is tough and terrifying, and if nothing else, probably knows all the tricks and tortures that Rittenhouse will try to use against her, but this –

“You’re despicable,” Lucy says quietly. “Truly despicable.”

“This wasn’t my call.” Emma looks affronted, despite herself. “It was your mother’s. I think she still feels that if she can get the Flynns out of the way, you’ll listen to her, see the light and return to the fold. What is it about you, Lucy, that gets everyone to act so irrationally? Why does everyone bend over backwards hoping you’ll join them and/or fuck them? Your mother, John, _him –_ ” She jerks a thumb at Flynn. “You’re not really that special. Anyway, I told Carol that this wasn’t the way to go about it, that torturing Iris would just make all of you more angry, but you know how she gets. So. Are you coming or not?”

For a moment, Lucy can’t speak. She can’t just leave Iris to Rittenhouse’s tender mercies, she can’t let her mother get away with this, she can’t see a way out of this, and she can’t under any circumstances agree to be separated from Flynn. After a fraught pause, she says, “You’ll take us to wherever you’re holding Iris. I’ll see for myself. Then we can talk… terms.”

Emma smirks, as if to say it’s cute that they think this is a bargain, but fine, she’ll play ball. She shouts down the stairs – clearly she wasn’t dumb enough to come alone – and a whole passel of goons appear to take firm hold of Lucy and Flynn, march them out into the street, and bundle them into a hansom cab that they have apparently rented just for the occasion. Have to do your period-appropriate kidnapping in style, after all. Lucy is sorely tired of being abducted and manipulated and pushed around by Rittenhouse, and she is just about ready to do something drastic to ensure that this is the last time it happens. A muscle is going in Flynn’s cheek, and his hands open and close on his knees. Lucy reaches over to put her hand over his, and their eyes meet, communicating a silent promise. They are in this together.

It isn’t that long of a ride to the handsome brick townhouse on the waterfront that Rittenhouse has acquired for their 1872 headquarters, and in that time, Lucy has some – not much, but some – chance to think. She’s tired of being frightened of her mother, tired of fighting with her, and she still remembers what Flynn did for his father back in Russia. Obviously, that is not going to work as an exact blueprint, but as Emma says, this keeps coming down to Lucy. Lucy is the one on who everything turns. Going ten rounds in the ring with Rittenhouse, trying to out-bleed them, trading punches, one mission after another, rattling around like marbles through all of time and space, isn’t working. And since they’re on the verge of getting everything they ever wanted, this is it. Zero hour. Lucy figures out to outsmart them for good, right now, and end this, or everyone loses everything.

No pressure.

The hansom rolls to a halt before the house, and Emma comes around to get the door like an evil footwoman, offering her hand to Lucy with a faint smirk. Lucy ignores it, though she manages to trip on the step, and Flynn catches her from behind. He sets her upright on the muddy cobbles, managing an impressive amount of restraint given the fact that his daughter is presumably being held prisoner in that very house. The old Flynn would have drawn his gun and barged in, spraying bullets everywhere, but this new Flynn is – well, still inclined to cause calamity, but in a different way. He’s tense, furious, on edge, and frightened, but he’s keeping it in check. Following Lucy’s lead on this. Trusting her.

Lucy hopes it’s justified. Straightens her back, lifts her chin, and looks Emma dead in the eye. “I’d like to see my mother.”

Emma pauses, shrugs, and with an escort of armed goons falling in to either side, they enter the house, making their way to the elegantly wallpapered parlor at the back. Carol Preston is sitting in an armchair sipping tea, looking like a _Pride and Prejudice_ extra, but gets to her feet at the sight of them. “Lucy.”

“Mom.” Lucy smiles sweetly at her, and even strides over to kiss her cheek. “You know that dress is very old-fashioned for 1872, don’t you? And you were the historian too.”

“I haven’t had much occasion to change.” Carol smiles airily back, trying to brush it off, but Lucy sees something almost like hurt in her eyes. “Things have been… complicated.”

“Yes, they have. Where’s Iris?”

Carol’s eyes flicker again, between Lucy and Flynn, as if trying to judge the likelihood of driving a wedge between them one more time. Whatever she sees, it doesn’t please her. Finally she says, “Downstairs. Did Emma tell you what we want?”

“Yes. Thoroughly.” Lucy takes the liberty of helping herself to a seat on the davenport, and after less than an instant, Flynn sits next to her, their hands once more reaching for the other’s. “What did the crew of the _Mary Celeste_ have that Rittenhouse wants?”

“I don’t think that’s – ”

“Mom.” Again, that smile sharpened to draw blood. Lucy feels almost giddy, driven on something that isn’t even rage, isn’t hatred, but is forged stronger than both. Maybe she’s channeling her inner Flynn. “Haven’t you kept enough from me by now?”

Carol flinches, ever so slightly. She appears set to start into her usual spiel about this is what is best for Lucy, that she will come around to it, that she’s done everything to make her see it, but at last, it seems to taste as dry and withered on her tongue as it falls on Lucy’s ears. She keeps staring at her daughter and her – well, whatever Flynn is. There’s still no easy word for it. At last she says, “It’s a device made by Charles Babbage. It was taken to America a few years ago – 1869 – for tests, and for the Rittenhouse leadership to approve it. Now it’s going back to be installed. Or. It was.”

Lucy takes a moment to absorb that. The great Victorian inventor, engineer, and eccentric Charles Babbage is the man who, along with Lord Byron’s daughter Ada Lovelace, will be credited as the father of the computer in a century or so. He drew up prototypes for a Difference Engine and an Analytical Engine that never actually ran, along with just about everything else, and as far as Lucy recalls, he did in fact just die last year, 1871. Rittenhouse has stolen his stuff and is going to put it into practical application – or was going to, until someone on the _Mary Celeste_ did a bunk with it. “So,” she says at last. “Rittenhouse was supposed to have a fully functioning computer, or computer-like machine, a full century before anyone else. You could graduate to the time machine about – when? The Manhattan Project?” That’s not a scary thought at all. “No need to wait until Mason Industries gets around to inventing it in 2016. You’d have it up and running long before any of us were born. We’d be out of the way at long last. No more missions, no more trying to change things piecemeal before we get there. You could have it set.”

“Yes.” Carol looks at her with that glimmer of pride she sometimes used to show, all too rarely, when Lucy tried and tried to impress her. “So you see it.”

“Yes,” Lucy says in turn, quite calmly. “Mom, you know we can’t let you do that.”

Carol seems to want to say something else, but it doesn’t make it to her lips. “Lucy,” she starts again. “Lucy, I – ”

“Emma said that three of us can go back on the Lifeboat, once we’ve given you the Mothership and retrieved this,” Lucy continues remorselessly. “But I can’t go back, because I’ve been erased. Which you know. And since I get the feeling that not a whole lot happens in Rittenhouse without you knowing, did you honestly stand by and tell whoever’s running this organization now that it was fine to delete both your daughters – I don’t know if you remember Amy, but I think somehow you do – in the name of world domination? Pull the switch, I’m gone? Did that really not bother you at _all?”_

“Of course it…” Carol rubs her thin fingers under her eyes, a gesture Lucy also remembers well, the one her mother always made when extemporizing about how she just wishes Lucy would try harder. “Of course I didn’t _want_ to erase you, Lucy! I never did! I was – I was quite young when you were born, you know. The first time they laid you in my arms and I looked down at you, I… I swore I’d never let anything happen to you. It’s… it’s just… been hard.”

Lucy regards her mother in silence. For the first time in a very long while, she feels a prickle of sympathy. Carol Preston, born and raised Rittenhouse, meets an older college professor when she’s nineteen years old, gets wined and dined and seduced – what did Benjamin Cahill do, whisper dazzling Rittenhouse secrets in her ear? Carol’s probably made plenty of sense of it as an adult, rationalized it, justified it, but she was still a young woman taken advantage of by a major leader in the cult in which she has been indoctrinated from birth. She’s chosen to embrace it, rather than escape it, but she is a victim too. Knew it was her job to breed up good Rittenhouse stock, just like John intended to do with Lucy. She’s still doing this because she genuinely has managed to convince herself it’s best. Otherwise, she might realize what she _has_ done, what she’s given up, and crumble.

The silence continues. Emma has positioned herself behind Carol’s chair like a bodyguard, but when Carol doesn’t speak, she gives her boss a pointed look. “Well? Should I get Iris?”

“I – yes.” Carol’s fingers twist the fabric of her out-of-date dress. “Go get her.”

Flynn tenses, and Lucy puts a hand on his arm, holding him back, as Emma vanishes out the door. After a few minutes, she returns, hauling Iris. The junior Flynn is battered and bruised, but Emma is still having to work hard, and Iris is struggling to escape her cuffs as Emma pushes her into the room. At the sight of them, her jaw drops, but she manages to avoid saying anything out loud. It’s Emma who has to prompt, “Well?”

“I see.” Iris works her jaw, as if checking for loosened teeth. “Congratulations.”

“They’re here,” Emma says. “So remember that if you don’t do as I say – ”

“Yes,” Iris says, sounding bored. “You’re going to kill me, kill us. You still think that’s the worst thing you can do, don’t you? You already killed me and my mother once. You brainwashed me and stole my second life, you’ve erased Lucy, you’ve done God knows what to Daddy, and yet – here we still are. All that effort for really nothing, I’d say.”

Emma looks unimpressed, but Carol flinches again. Finally she says ingratiatingly, “Lucy, honey. I’ll make you a deal. You can go free with Iris _and…_ him.” She can’t bring herself to acknowledge Flynn by any sort of name. “When Rufus and Wyatt get here, they can join you. We will make you any sort of happy home you want, in whatever… configuration. Just get the Babbage device, and give it to us, and you can have anything, any life you please.”

Lucy opens her mouth, then shuts it. Rittenhouse has been leaning so hard on vinegar as a negotiation tactic that they were possibly overdue to bust out the honey, but it still takes her off guard. It’s plain that Carol is starting to buckle a bit, that the guilt is getting to her, that she has once more convinced herself that she’s making up for everything she’s done to Lucy, everything she’s used and deceived and lied and broken apart, if she gives her a golden parachute now. Happy life for you and your boy toy(s), Rittenhouse takes over the world, squaresies. Of course there would be a catch. They’d probably wipe their memories, they wouldn’t even know the terrible price they’d paid for it. And even if they did remember, they couldn’t interfere. Just sit back, and let the bastards win.

“That’s an interesting offer,” Lucy says at last, levelly. “But you know. I kind of already had a life I wanted. It wasn’t perfect, but it was mine. I worked hard and I was good at my job and people respected me. I don’t know if I just want to go back to being a Stanford history professor after everything I’ve done and seen and experienced, but I’d like to have the choice. But neither the existence or the world that I left are still there. It’s altered beyond recognition. So what? You’d make me some fairytale castle somewhere, far away from the world? I’m not a princess in a tower, Mom. I can’t be kept there. I want my sister back. I want my life.”

“We could…” Carol starts, and then stops. Knowing as much as Lucy does that in the timeline Amy exists, Carol is dying of cancer. Can’t figure out how to have one without the other, can’t finesse their way around it without more changes, and ones they have no idea where to find or make. Finally she says, “We could put you back. Into history.”

“Could you?” Lucy looks at her wearily. “Rittenhouse is really good at erasing people, tearing things down. Critics. Problems. Innocents who get in the way, or are even tangentially connected to them.” She nods at Iris. “I’ve never seen anything to suggest it can build again, at least in any image that is not completely horrifying.”

Flynn has been uncharacteristically quiet through this entire thing, letting Lucy and Carol play out their wounds the way Lucy let him face his demons with Asher, but at that, he clears his throat. “You don’t know your daughter very well,” he says to Carol, but his eyes also flick to Iris in a way that means he in no way exonerates himself from it, that he knows the same sin applies to him. “You don’t know that she’d still rather give up everything that matters to her, take on unbearable suffering, if it means she’d save the world. I don’t know how she became so damn heroic with you and the corporate avatar of Satan for parents, but she did. You keep offering her what you would take, or what I would. But she’s not us. She’s better than us. And you’ve had your daughter your whole life, you’ve never known what it was like to lose her as a child, and what have you done with it, with who she is? You’ve missed it. You’ve missed it. And even someone like you, one day you’ll give anything to change it.”

Carol’s face is the color of an old sheet. She can’t look Flynn in the eye. “But I’m giving you what you want, Lucy,” she manages at last. “Your friends, your – ”

“I need to find Wyatt and Rufus,” Lucy says levelly. “Are they here?”

“We – imagine they are, yes.”

“Good.” Lucy starts to get to her feet. “I think I know where I’m going to find them. In the meantime, you’re going to set Iris free, and you two – ” she glances at the Flynns, who aren’t exactly the most stable houseguests – “are going to stay here for now. Emma, Mom, you won’t do anything to them while I’m gone. Is that clear?”

“Lucy – ” Emma, Carol, and Flynn all start at once.

“I said, _is that clear?”_

They stare at her. Her voice cracks like a whip. She has never felt more powerful, and terrible, and strange, and strong. There’s no time for anything else.

After a pause, everyone nods.

“Good.”

As Lucy is heading down the hallway to the front door, scattering Rittengoons like the Red Sea as she goes, she hears footsteps running behind her, and the next instant, Flynn catches her arm, his entire face carved in a mask of distress. “Lucy. Lucy!”

Lucy wants to go, wants to get this over with, but she can’t shake him off. Or she could, perhaps, but she won’t, and she comes to a halt. If he keeps holding onto her, she might lose her nerve, and like her mother perhaps, she might crumble. In a different way, but still. As ever, she has to tilt her chin back to look at him. “Yes, Garcia?”

“What are you – ” Flynn glares the last goon into retreat, until it’s just them in the corridor, casting faint shadows on the runner carpet. He lowers his voice to a whisper. “What are you going to do?”

Lucy looks up at him, this contradictory, dangerous, stubborn, impossible, tender man. Words momentarily fail her as she brushes her fingers along his scruffy jaw. “What I have to.”

Flynn’s lips go grim, as if he knew that was the answer, he would give anything to stop her, and yet, by rights, he knows he can’t. She starts to move away, but he grabs her back, almost roughly, and crushes her to him, kissing her ferociously, both hands cupping her face and something almost desperate in his entire body, to hold her, to remember her. Lucy kisses him back just as hard, and then, in the breath between touching and parting, between presence and absence, between now and forever, as their noses and foreheads are brushing, as they are wrecked and shaking, she whispers, “I love you.”

She leaves before he gets himself together enough to answer.

She doesn’t – she _can’t bear –_ to look back.

* * *

 “So let me get this straight,” Rufus says. “Rittenhouse followed us here with the garage-cinderblock time machine. They want the thing Captain Briggs stole – the Babbage device that means they invent the actual time machine decades ahead of schedule, before we’re even born. And if we do that, your evil mom lets me, you, Wyatt, Flynn, and Iris go off into happy retirement and drink mojitos on the beach. While they’re Emperor Palpatining the shit out of everything and everywhere else, like they could convince Luke not to blow up the Death Star if they just gave him a fat payout and a new identity.”

“Something like that, yes.” Lucy’s eyes still aren’t quite meeting his or Wyatt’s. There were relieved hugs and disbelieving greetings, the way there always are when the Time Team is reunited after a separation, but they haven’t seen Lucy in a long time (literally), there’s a lot of water under the bridge, and it’s clear to Rufus that she’s holding something back. All three of them have been through a hell of a lot, in their various ways, and this meeting feels different. They’re still on the same side, of course, but there’s more space than there used to be. Some of it is unavoidable. Some of it feels deliberate.

“We can’t do that,” Wyatt says. “We can’t just give Rittenhouse carte blanche to do whatever they want, even if we were somehow taking their word that we’d get a nice life out of it. That’s what we’ve been fighting to avoid this entire damn time!”

“Obviously.” Lucy’s voice is brittle. “I didn’t intend to agree.”

Wyatt looks at her worriedly. They’re sitting under a piling by the docks, the _Mary Celeste_ still just a few dozen yards away, and he reaches out to take her hand. “Lucy, you’re scaring me.”

Lucy takes a deep breath, as Rufus reaches out to grab her other hand. “I have a hunch,” she says evasively. “I need Rufus to explain the science and tell me if it’s even possible. Then we can decide what to do.”

“Oh?” Rufus likes this even less. “What’s that?”

“I’m just thinking.” Lucy stares straight ahead. “All of this trouble, all this disruption to the timeline started with me. Things started going off the rails when Rittenhouse erased me in 1814, and all of our interventions with the war of 1812 messed up America for the Civil War, which led to – well, the present situation back in 2017. So it’s possible to argue that I’m the one factor in common, and that all our efforts to restore me have just succeeded in twisting and deforming this new timeline even more. We’re never going to put me back, and we’re just going to cause more damage trying.”

“Yes, but – ”

“Just let me finish.” Lucy looks like she’ll lose her nerve unless she can plunge through to the end. “I’m the wrench in the gears, don’t you see? We’ve gone off on some alternate reality, some diversion from the mean, because of me. Theoretically, if you cut me out before I did that, if you set the slate clean, everything would snap back into place. History would go back to normal, all the changes would unravel. And if that was the case – ”

Rufus gets it first. “No,” he says. “No. No, no, no.”

“What?” Wyatt demands. “What?”

“You have to,” Lucy says. Her face is dead white, but utterly, stonily resolute. “Then you, Wyatt, Iris, and Flynn go back to the present. The Lifeboat’s been modified, it can take four adults. Once you get there, you blow it up. It’s done. No more loose ends.”

“What about – ” Wyatt’s face freezes as he starts to grapple with a pair of very important omissions. “What about you and the Mothership?”

“Yes,” Lucy says. “That.”

“You’re – ” Wyatt gets it. “You’re going to sacrifice yourself?”

“Yes,” Lucy says again, simply. “We slingshot me back before the first time I’ve visited – the furthest back I’ve gone is Salem, 1692 – so you have to send me earlier than that. Then I just… keep going. If I’m destroyed before I’ve done anything, all my changes vanish. As I said, space-time snaps back into place like a stretched rubber band. Rufus, am I wrong?”

“I – ” Rufus has no idea how he is supposed to sit here and treat this like a cool theoretical science problem, when his friend’s life – her very _existence –_ is the collateral of solving it. “I – yes, technically, I suppose. It could work. But Lucy – Lucy, you _can’t –_ ”

“We’ve always known this turned on me somehow,” Lucy points out, with devastating pragmatism. “John Rittenhouse, Emma, my own mother, you, Benjamin Cahill, everyone. If I can fix it, if I can end this, I have a responsibility to do it.”

“No,” Wyatt says frantically. “No, Lucy. I’ll do it. If it’s just a matter of taking the Mothership back to, whatever, the Jurassic, and crashing it – ”

“You can’t.” Lucy’s voice is soft and very sad. “You’re not the one who broke the timeline. You could destroy the Mothership, but you couldn’t fix all the other stuff. Once I’m gone, everything resets. Benjamin Briggs went out to sea and never came back, to keep the Babbage device away from Rittenhouse. Made a sacrifice and saw it through. Now I have to do the same. It has to be me.”

“We’ll all go,” Rufus says. “If it’s a final suicide mission, blowing up in a blaze of glory together – we’ll go with you to the end, Lucy, you don’t have to – ”

“No.” Lucy looks at both of them with unspeakable tenderness, squeezing their hands. “No. We don’t have to all die. You two can live. Flynn and Iris can live. Iris was back before I got erased and started all this disruption, she’ll still be alive after I’m gone. No more time machines. No more Rittenhouse. Well, they’ll exist in some way, but they won’t have any more power than any other major evil corporation, and I can’t get rid of all the bad things in the world. But I can do this. I don’t want to die. I don’t want to never exist. I don’t want to forget you, I don’t want you to forget me. And yet.”

Wyatt tries to answer, and can’t. His eyes swim with silent, unshed tears, until he finally lifts Lucy’s hand to his mouth and kisses it. “I could never forget you.”

“You will,” Lucy says, very gently. “You will never have known me.”

“I don’t accept that. We’re here, we’re living this, we’re remembering each other right now How can that just… go away?”

Lucy touches his face. “Maybe it won’t. Maybe you’ll dream of me.”

Wyatt closes his eyes as if he’s been shot, and can’t come up with any other words at all. There is a long, impossible silence, and then Lucy rouses herself, looking at Rufus. “Could you do it?” she asks. “Could you program the Mothership to fly into the sun, so to speak? I get into it, and… go? Rittenhouse doesn’t get the Babbage device, or it, or me. Could you?”

“Could I program it for a self-destruct course into what, the beginning of time?” Rufus’s voice scratches in his chest. “The override is still in it, so… I suppose, but – ”

“Please,” Lucy says. “Garcia, Iris, and I came here in the Mothership, I know where it is. We have to go before Rittenhouse knows what’s up.”

“Just go?” Rufus isn’t sure he believes that. “Without – saying goodbye? To him? Flynn?”

It’s Lucy’s turn to close her eyes. “I said goodbye to him already,” she says, after a very long pause. “I think he knew it.”

Rufus opens his mouth, then shuts it. There is an almost physical ache in his chest, the refusal to face what is in front of him, to wrap his head around it, and yet it must be nothing to what Wyatt – much less Lucy – is feeling. He can’t do that, he can’t do this. His big nerd brain, crammed full of science and engineering and the most esoteric bits of bullshit known to man, scrambles for another solution. Anything. No matter what.

He can’t find one.

“Okay,” he says at last. “Let’s go.”

It’s not far from the docks to where Lucy and the Flynns have left the Mothership, and Rufus’s stomach turns over at the sight, the fact that he can’t put this off anymore. His hands are shaking as they cycle the overrides and climb in to look at the control panel as if this is a mildly interesting science fair project. But the unavoidable context is that Lucy is going to get into this, seal herself up, and fly up the ass of time and space, a trip from which she will not return. They have done everything together, it is unfathomable that it should end with one of them alone. But Lucy is Lucy. She’s always been the best of them.

Rufus forces himself to do this dispassionately, to avoid the desperate urge to cheat. He can’t half-ass this, and yet he so badly wants to, as he plugs into the main console and starts tinkering with the parameters for a final jump. This feels like something that a white dude named Steve should be doing, taking a plane out to sea to save everyone and dying in the process. Rufus can’t be sure how early is too early to send Lucy. Can he just, say, plonk her down in the medieval era somewhere, or should it be ancient Rome? Cavemen? Is she actually the meteor that kills the dinosaurs? This is ridiculous. He was never trained for this.

Finally, Rufus settles on the only thing he can think of. He has to send Lucy as far back as the Mothership can go, however far this pocket of altered space-time exists, and out the other side. But there’s a scientific principle known as quantum suicide, which operates along the same lines as Schrödinger’s cat. Basically, if the many-worlds interpretation of reality is true – which Rufus now knows for a fact it is, given the number of timeline changes they’ve made – death isn’t really death. Under certain circumstances, if you die in one world, you have to spawn a competing one where you survive. Maybe that explains the afterlife; you die in physical reality, but you’re reborn somewhere else. If Lucy dies in this alternate history, there’s a chance – the tiniest, most ridiculous, mathematical technicality of a chance – that the reality where she survives is their own. That one day, who knows when because time doesn’t really apply in its normal dimensions, she can come back. Maybe that’s years before or after. Maybe she comes back here, in 1872, and lives a life never knowing them. Maybe it’s centuries in the future (if Trump and the North Korean guy don’t blow it up first). But she could still live. Maybe. Maybe.

Science has always been Rufus’s comfort and solace. He has to take what he can get.

Finally, Rufus’s work is complete. The Mothership is programmed on a straight dead run, as far back as can be gone, and then when it hits the edges of reality, it’ll explode, because there will be no more time left to traverse. He’s almost jealous of Lucy, in a sick way. No other human will do this, will so thoroughly transcend all mortal limitations. It’s almost apotheosis, fittingly. She is going out by sticking two middle fingers up Albert Einstein’s ass. So to speak. Might see all of history flash before her, know it as if she was there, a final gift for someone who has loved it so much and studied it so long. He hopes.

Rufus raises a hand, far too steady for the situation, and punches the button to lock in the coordinates. The trajectory can’t be changed now.

“Well?” Lucy says. “What do I need to do?”

“You hit that lever there.” Rufus points. “The autopilot is engaged to do the rest. You don’t need to steer, after all. You just need to…”

He can’t finish the sentence. Lucy does.

“Go.”

Wyatt has been standing with his back to them, unable to watch, but at this, he turns around. He has lost his battle with the tears, and they’re dripping down his face as he swipes it roughly with his arm. “Lucy – ”

“It’s all right.” Lucy looks a little teary herself, but her chin is firm. “I’m not scared.”

Rufus and Wyatt look at her with helpless, impossible love and admiration. They reach out and take each of her hands, walking her slowly to the Mothership for the last time, unable to countenance the prospect of getting there. They drag out each step, but they know that as ever, the clock is ticking. This needs to be a fait accompli before Rittenhouse gets any wind of it. Lucy’s told them where to find Flynn and Iris. Grab them, get to the Lifeboat, and back to what should be a no-more-terrible-than-usual present, back to normal. Except there’s no Lucy. There won’t be again, according to every decent set of odds in the universe.

It’s too much. They can’t do it.

But Lucy isn’t going to let them avoid it.

They reach the Mothership, and communally freeze. They close their eyes, draw in a breath and then out. Lucy squeezes their hands tight enough to hurt, as if this, among others, is the last sensation she will take into the supernova. That this, she will remember.

She turns to them. Leans down and kisses Wyatt, then Rufus, and they reach out to crush her in their arms in a tangled three-way hug. They’re shaking, but she’s not, and she’s the one who has to push back and start up the steps to her own tomb. Then she stops.

“Flynn,” she says. For the first time, her voice shakes. “Tell him.”

Wyatt and Rufus can’t fathom doing that. Tell Garcia Flynn that he’s lost another loved one, even like this? He could grab the Lifeboat and try to crash after her, leave them stranded here, or – well, just about anything else terrible. But they both nod. As if they’d do anything else.

Wyatt says, “Okay.”

Rufus says, “Okay.”

Lucy looks back at them, filling herself with the sight of them, the sound, the memory. Then she turns back, climbs the steps, and seals the door.

For a moment, even if the alternative is worse, Rufus hopes he’s made a mistake. That he programmed something wrong. That it won’t go where it’s going, and it won’t do what it’s doing. But he knows himself too well. He didn’t make a mistake.

The blue lights flash. The gyration starts to build. He can’t see Lucy, but he can imagine her, sitting calmly in the pilot seat, facing the lever she has to pull. If there’s a moment of fear, of weakness, if she sobs, if she puts her hand over her face and gives into the sheer grief of losing, of ceasing, of the sheer, simple mortal fact of finiteness, nobody will ever know.

The Mothership flashes white as a burning star, as Rufus and Wyatt shield their eyes but don’t look away. Whirls faster and faster.

Then it’s gone.

* * *

Garcia Flynn doesn’t know what’s going on, but he doesn’t like it.

To be fair, it would be surprising if he knew anything, could remotely focus on it, could have attention to spare for anything at all, when Lucy’s last words are still rattling around in his head. _She_ said – she _said – she said –_ and it’s succeeded admirably in freezing all motor or higher cognitive functions. Good thing she didn’t wait around for an answer, as Flynn’s brain was still making a noise like a fork in a garbage disposal, but he can’t shake the feeling that he’s missed his chance to say it back. If he could get himself to the point, after all. But she said it, and now she’s gone, and he doesn’t know how long it should take to track down Wyatt and Rufus and ask them – whatever she was going to ask them, but it feels as if it should have been long enough. There’s an unease in his stomach, a prickling on the back of his neck, that doesn’t merely derive from waiting in a parlor across from – now that John Rittenhouse is dead, just as Flynn tried to do so long ago back in 1780 – the organization’s two highest-ranking CEOs. However Rittenhouse hierarchy works, Carol and Emma have to be near the top, and they’re just sitting there. Flynn should be throttling them.

But he – but they – promised. Promised Lucy. They can’t.

To distract himself, and because his head won’t shut up about failing her again, Flynn looks at Iris. She looks more or less fine, if you can discount the refreshing spot of kidnapping and beating that she just went through – painful, but not life-threatening. She doesn’t look broken, in other words. The Flynn family is too used to violence for it to be anything new, or that they can’t recover from, and after a glance at Emma and Carol, Iris gets up and moves to sit next to her father. “I’m all right,” she says quietly. “They can’t hurt me anymore.”

Flynn lets out an unsteady breath, and takes her offered hand. There are plenty of things he could say and think about the fact that they have hurt her this much already, but for once, he doesn’t. The four of them continue to sit there in the world’s most awkward détente, until something on Emma’s wrist beeps, and she looks down, then frowns. “Something’s going haywire with the Mothership.”

“What?” Flynn jumps to his feet. “You send some pit crew to steal it while our backs were turned?”

“This isn’t us,” Emma says sharply. “What did _you_ do?”

“I didn’t – ”

“What is it?” Carol gets to her feet, looking alarmed. “What’s going on?”

“I still have a link to the Mothership’s CPU.” Emma waves her wrist at them. “It’s – I’ve never seen readings like this, it’s – ”

She stops.

“It’s what?” Flynn half-shouts. “WHAT?”

“It’s running backwards,” Emma says, almost uncertainly. “It keeps going faster and faster by exponential magnitudes, it’s like it’s malfunctioning. Or like it’s – ”

She doesn’t finish the sentence, but Flynn has acquired a fairly close competence with the Mothership’s inner workings, and he doesn’t think that it could be plunging by itself through time, if someone wasn’t driving it. He doesn’t know what happened or how, but he is convinced at that moment that he knows who is. And that he was right about the kiss earlier. It was more than just their last one for now. It was their last one ever. That’s why she said it.

“Lucy,” he says. “Lucy!”

“Carol!” Emma whirls to her boss. “Carol, we can still stop this. Give the order, I’ll get the team, get to the Lifeboat and intercept her before she goes totally off the map. We still have something like five minutes to cut her off. Now, otherwise we’re going to lose –  Carol? Carol! Listen to me!”

Carol Preston has remained rooted to the spot, a look of awful realization coming across her face. Her lips move around something that might be her daughter’s name.

“Lucy?” Large chunks of information are falling into place in Flynn’s head, like crashing boulders. “LUCY!” As if she can hear him. As if she can hear anything. He snatches for his gun and is set to tear out after Emma, not even knowing what he’s going to do after that, just that he can’t stand by and let this happen. The bleeping from Emma’s wrist is getting more and more frantic, frenzied and scrambling, a long, piercing electronic whine. The Mothership is doing something it was never designed to do, and it’s doing it fucking fast. If Lucy’s aboard, if she’s doing it, if it was a choice to take this to the end –

“Carol!” Emma shouts, snapping her fingers, looking as if she’s on the brink of shaking the older woman. “Carol, orders? ORDERS!”

Carol still doesn’t move. It’s not clear if she remembers how. But as Emma clearly realizes that she’s on her own in this, and lunges for the door, Carol suddenly comes back to life. Moves at the same time, jerks open a desk drawer, and pulls out a modern Glock handgun with wildly shaking hands. Aims it – not at Flynn or Iris, but Emma – and pulls the trigger.

The sound of the shot is deafening in the small parlor. Emma’s lunge turns into a stumble, and she goes down hard, the back of her left thigh swiftly turning red. “Are you out of your _mind?”_ she yells, face twisted in pain and rage. The electronic whine from her wrist is now almost at full volume, a shrieking fire alarm. “What the – what the _fuck_ did you – ”

Carol raises the gun, hands shaking harder, clearly about to shoot again and finish this, but it’s Iris – Iris, who Carol had tortured, Iris, who Emma helped brainwash in the first place – who steps between them. “Carol,” she orders. “Carol, give me the gun.”

Flynn’s heart shrivels in his throat to see Iris once more on the wrong end of a gun held by a Rittenhouse member. The whining continues to shrill at full volume, but it’s starting to turn sporadic, turn patchy, going for brief bursts and then cutting out. Then it raises one more time, and cuts off in a puff of white smoke and breaking glass from Emma’s wristwatch. When Flynn snatches it up, the readout is cracked and black and empty. There’s no more Mothership CPU. There’s no more Mothership.

There’s no more Lucy.

He isn’t sure who the howl comes from, him or Carol, maybe both. He grabs the broken monitor, shaking it as if to restore a lost wifi signal, but there’s no use, he already knows it. He can feel it in his bones, his heart, his soul, the absence of everywhere Lucy used to live, everything she owned, even if he didn’t know it, from the moment he saw her. Garcia Flynn is a big man, but he crumples to his knees like a scrap of silk or rice paper, feels as if his spine has snapped, he can’t stand up. The world is once again intolerable, unbearable, slamming him into the ground. He struggles to endure this, when there is not enough space inside him for himself and the grief, and doesn’t, as ever, have a single notion how.

“Lucy.” Carol’s voice sounds like a ghost. _“Lucy.”_

“She’s gone,” Emma gasps, angry and hurt and furious. “She’s gone, and you shot me.”

Carol raises the gun again, but Iris reaches out and grabs the muzzle, jerking it out of her hand. “You’ve killed enough people,” she says, cold as stone. “Even if you never pointed the gun at them directly and pulled the trigger, you have. That’s plenty.”

Emma stares at her, knowing that this is the most unexpected deliverance of all time, that she doesn’t deserve it in the least. That Iris would be justified in standing aside and letting Carol finish her, or taking the gun and doing it herself. Emma opens her mouth, then shuts it, and rolls onto her back with a grimace, clutching her wounded leg. She can’t get to her feet. The silence thunders.

Iris switches the safety on, tucks the gun into her waistband, and walks over to Flynn. Reaches out, and takes him by the arm. Tentatively, she says, “Daddy?”

Flynn can’t answer her, can’t get his tongue around words. He isn’t sure he will be able to again. He lets her help him to his feet, because he can’t think what else to do. Puts his arm around Iris’ shoulders, as she stares down Carol without a flinch. She says, “You let us go.”

Carol is ashen-faced. It’s not clear that she would resist even if she could. As if now, just as Flynn warned, it’s hit. The realization of all the offerings she has burned on Rittenhouse’s altar, and what they have left her with as a result. Now. This.

Nothing.

Iris says, “Did I stutter?”

Carol shakes her head.

Garcia and Iris Flynn turn their backs, and start to walk. Move past Emma, still on the floor, and down the hall, and out the door, out into a world that somehow still exists, is turning onward. It’s barely a dozen yards down the street until they run into Wyatt Logan and Rufus Carlin, coming the other way. One look at everyone’s faces confirms that nobody needs to ask what happened. Nobody can bear it.

They go to find the Lifeboat, and one last time, jump home.

* * *

It’s difficult to grieve for someone who, technically, never lived, and so has never died.

When Wyatt, Rufus, Flynn, and Iris get back, it – for one thing – isn’t 2017 anymore, as they’ve spent enough time mucking around in the past that it’s the new year, 2018. For another, everything is back to normal. History has unbent. Trump is president of the USA, not the CSA (equally depressing though that is) and everything has happened the way it was supposed to. Rittenhouse doesn’t exist, so far as they can tell, because Emma and Carol were stranded in 1872. They search and search until they find the small notice of an obituary in 1895, in San Francisco, for a _C. Preston._ As for Emma, nothing. Maybe she died there in Gibraltar; medical care still wasn’t that great. Maybe not. Who knows. As for Carol, she went home. Tried to live out the rest of her life before she herself was born. Knowing what she’d lost the whole time. Nobody has warm feelings for her, but that still hurts.

Lucy Preston does not exist, obviously. Has never existed.

And yet, Flynn, Wyatt, Rufus, and Iris remember her.

Jiya doesn’t. Denise doesn’t. Connor Mason doesn’t. They bemusedly take everyone’s word for it that they had a partner named Lucy (they’re more confused as to how Flynn is now part of the gang), but it’s the sort of all-right-whatever-you-say acceptance of their zany adventures rather than any real understanding. Jiya doesn’t remember having forgotten Rufus, at least, and their reunion is happy. At least someone gets that. Rufus deserves it.

With no more Rittenhouse and no more time machines (since they destroyed the Lifeboat when they got back, before Connor Mason could sleaze in there and have anything to say about it one way or another) there is no more Time Team, no more insane, hair-raising missions through time and space. Everyone struggles to go back to anything resembling an ordinary life, but it doesn’t work. Wyatt can’t go back to being a grunt with a gun, even a special ops one, and he leaves Pendleton a few months later. Ends up, of all the things nobody would expect, moving in with Flynn and Iris.

It is oddly easier like that. They can grieve together, in whatever strange, truncated way they can. Flynn has bought a small house on a leafy street, with the payout that Mason Industries gave him once they also saw about expunging his criminal record. He and Iris have no idea what they’re doing with the rest of their lives just yet, though Iris has been making noises about going back to school. After he bought the house, Flynn donated the rest of the money to the Stanford history department, to establish the Lucy Preston Scholarship. He feels it’s as if what she would have wanted.

(He thought about calling it the _Memorial_ Scholarship, but he can’t do that. Not least when there’s nobody actually there to remember. Stanford is confused enough about why he’s giving money for someone who doesn’t exist, but it’s a lot, so they don’t ask.)

Wyatt has also given part of his payout to the scholarship, but he’s invested the rest, so he and Flynn don’t need to work for a while yet – or ever, if they don’t want to. They will, because they’re not the type of men who can sit idle, but they’re still reeling, and they’re in no shape to embark on some new career. Private security would seem to fit their existing skill set, but they’re both tired of the weight and sound and sight of guns, the killing they have done, and the choices they can’t take back. They still bicker a lot, because of course they do, but in a different way. It’s easier to just miss Lucy with every waking moment if they know the other is doing the same. A strange kind of solace. Misery loves company.

It’s been about eight months since they returned – it’s August, in fact – and it’s a warm, perfect summer night in the Bay Area. Flynn is home alone. Wyatt is out taking one of his long night drives along the Pacific Coast Highway, and Iris is downtown at an event. Flynn is wondering if he has the ambition to get up and make himself some dinner, but he isn’t sure he does. At least when he lost Lorena (and Iris) the first time, he had the whirl of preparation to occupy him, the insane belief that there was going to be a time machine that he would steal and make it better, but this time, he doesn’t have anything. An older Lucy has not returned to console him for the loss of herself, or hand him another journal. He’s just had to grieve in the way ordinary people do, and it is straight up arse. There is no way to make it easier. It can’t be avoided or gotten rid of. Just gotten through.

After a moment, Flynn lets out a long, unsteady breath, gets to his feet, and unenthusiastically opens the fridge, reminding himself that they need to do the shopping at some point. He’s just trying to work out what he can concoct from the remnants, when there’s a knock on the door.

He frowns. He wasn’t expecting anyone, it’s late even for some dedicated Jehovah’s Witness, and if it was Wyatt or Iris, they wouldn’t knock. In fact, his mind flashes immediately to the possibility that Rittenhouse isn’t quite defunct after all. They’ve resuscitated somehow, they’ve tracked them down, and now it’s about to happen one more time. Flynn thinks of his gun, locked upstairs in a safe. Can he run up and get it if they break down the door?

After a long pause, the knock comes again. Tentative. It doesn’t sound like the prelude to an onrush of secret-society thugs with automatic weapons.

Flynn blows out a jagged breath, picks up the rolling pin just in case – maybe he can hit them on the head if he needs time to grab his gun – and advances warily down the front hall. The porch light has switched on, as it does with motion, and he hesitates. This could be anyone. He’s never going to get over his fear of unexpected visitors. They could –

He unhooks the bolt chain and opens the door an inch. “Can I help you?”

“Garcia?” The voice sounds faint. “Garcia, is that you?”

A lightning bolt carves Flynn down on the spot. He jerks the door open so fast he almost tears it off its hinges, and –

She does look older. There are a few silver streaks in her dark hair, though her skin is still smooth and flawless, except for a light spiderweb of lines around her eyes. She is dressed well, clutching a purse like a shield, waiting for this to be a total failure. At the sight of him, she opens her mouth, clears her throat, and says, “I’m sorry, this is awkward – I know you don’t know me, but if I can expl – ”

Flynn doesn’t let her finish. Takes half a step, half a lunge, seizes her around the waist, and doesn’t care what is remotely the case, what is truth or lie. He kisses Lucy Preston until neither of them can breathe, as her hands entwine around him and don’t let go and they pull each other’s heads from side to side, until they break apart and Lucy’s tears are falling thick and fast, even as her smile is blinding. “How…” she gasps. “How do you remember me?”

“How are you _here?”_ In the competition of impossible questions, Flynn feels as if his is still the more pertinent. “How did you – _how –_ ”

“I don’t know.” Lucy laughs shakily, even as she wipes her eyes. “But I think it’s called quantum suicide.”

That makes bugger-all sense to Flynn, one of Rufus’ mumbo-jumbo scientific concepts, perhaps, but he’ll ask him to explain later, later, _later_. He stares at Lucy one more time, then grabs her again, the purse falling with a thump to the porch as she shoves him back against the door, and they stumble through. It is wet and raw and savage, too desperate and rough and disbelieving to be tender, as they teeter through the dark front hall, banging into everything on the way. They are gasping and swearing into each other’s mouths, kissing and then pressing their foreheads together and then biting at each other, growling and sobbing. Lucy’s back hits the wall as Flynn lifts her, her legs linking around his waist, as they gulp half a breath from bare necessity, then turn and go after each other again.

Somehow, they make it down the hall to Flynn’s bedroom, shedding clothing as they go. Lucy’s in her bra and underpants by the time the door shuts, Flynn is undoing his belt and kicking off his trousers, and Wyatt, Iris, and the entire San Francisco 49ers football team could walk in right now and he would not give a single damn. He pulls Lucy into his arms, springing the bra loose, as she shucks the panties. Then it’s just them, in their skins, and it’s a dream, and it’s not, and it’s impossible, and it is not.

Lucy utters a small moan when Flynn enters her, their bodies jerking, her hands running up his thighs, trying to pull him closer, closer. Her arms go up around his neck, holding him close as he buries his face in her loosened hair, breathing the scent of her, trying to hold back his thrusts but completely unable to pace himself, needing nothing but the feeling of her. He kisses her blindly, tasting salt from her tears or his own, racking and rasping, half on the bed and half nowhere at all, her knee hiked up alongside his hip. She makes a little whining noise every time he hits that old sweet spot deep inside her, and it drives him harder.

They lose everything but each other. Lucy’s fingers claw and comb at the back of Flynn’s neck, in the dark hair that has a few silver threads of its own, then pulls his head back to hers as their mouths devour each other. At some point they roll over, Lucy ends up on top, and she rides Flynn mercilessly, head thrown back, mouth open, pulling herself against him with an intensity too frenetic to be distracted by anything else. Flynn would gladly die like this (and isn’t entirely sure he hasn’t), as if his heart will explode. It might have. He can’t tell.

It isn’t much longer until Lucy gasps, shudders from head to toe, and loses herself, dragging him after her within the space of a few moments, as she sways atop him, then leans forward, her head landing on his shoulder as she lies atop him, heaving. Flynn’s arms are somewhere far away in the whiteness, but he regains enough control to wrap them over her. “Are you…” He can’t understand why Lucy looks blank until it registers that he’s speaking in Croatian, and he coughs and struggles to switch back to English. “Are you really here?”

“I think so.” Lucy’s eyes shine with tears as she pushes herself up on one elbow to look down at him, her hair tumbling around her face, her lips bruised with kissing and her voice unbearably tender. “Are you?”

All things considered, Flynn isn’t entirely sure. He reaches up to touch her again, running a hand down her side, moving up to cup her breast, circling the nipple, tracing the collarbone. If this isn’t his Lucy, it’s a perfect imitation, and he has to fight one last stab of fear that this is all just a clever trick. He will wake up in morning light, and she will be gone.

There is something he still needs to say to her, for that matter. But last time, it was a goodbye, and he is too frightened that if he utters it now, it will be the same. That she will thank him, slide off, gather her clothes, and go. Or just dissolve into stardust. So he can’t. But God, how badly he wants the chance to try. The time. The mercy.

Instead, Garcia Flynn whispers, “Stay.”

Lucy leans down again, rests her head against his, and kisses the corner of his mouth. She seems to sense the words he can’t bring himself to, and settles back against his shoulder. That, perhaps, is what makes him finally believe it. That there will in fact be time, that she can wait, that she knows, that she knows. It does not have to be said tonight, because there will be more nights. More days. More mornings, and evenings, and weeks, and years.

Lucy shakes a bit. Starts, at long last, to cry. He holds her tighter.

She says, “Always.”

 

**THE END**


End file.
